Preliminaries to Speech Analysis: The Distinctive Features and Their Correlates

Abstract

The Concept of the Distinctive Feature 1.1 Resolving Speech into Ultimate Units 1.2 Invariance and Redundant Variations 1.3 Identification of Distinctive Features 1.4 Inherent and Prosodic Distinctive Features 1.5 The Distinctive Features Compared to Other Sound Features II A Tentative Survey of the Distinctive Features 2.1 Prefatory Acoustical Remarks 2.11 Properties of the Source Function Utilized in Language 2.111 Type of Source 2.112 Number of Sources 2.113 Transient Effects 2.12 Transfer Functions Utilized in Language 2.121 General Properties 2.122 Location of Source 2.123 Shape of the Vocal Tract 2.13 Neutral Position of the Vocal Tract 2.14 Phoneme BoundariesThis report proposes some questions to be discussed by specialists working on various aspects of speech communication.These questions concern the ultimate discrete components of language, their specific structure, their inven- tory in the languages of the world, their identification on the acoustical and perceptual levels and their articulatory prerequisites.We regard the present list of distinctive features, and particularly their defi- nitions on different levels, as a provisional sketch which is open to discussion and which requires experimental verification and further elaboration.The nature of these problems calls for coordinated research by linguists, psycho- logists, experts in the physiology of speech and hearing, physicists, communications and electronics engineers, mathematicians, students in symbolic logic and semiotics, and neurologists dealing with language disturbances, as well as the investigators of the poetic use of speech sounds.