What are UR and SF? Speakers in all languages possess abstract concepts about the sounds they articulate. In other words, they believe that they have an accurate awareness of speech sounds that they utter. Typically, though, there is a discrepancy between speakers’ own ideas about the sounds in their language use, and what they are actually articulating in practice. The underlying representation … [Read more...]
Redundancy and Underspecificity
Speech sounds are defined by distinctive phonetic properties or features that, when combined, distinguish these sounds from each other. We use the features [-syll, -cont, +ant, +cor, -vce] to represent the phoneme /t/. If any feature is altered, /t/ is no longer /t/, but a combination of the altered features. For example, changing [-vce] to [+vce] yields /d/. These are distinctive features. On the … [Read more...]
