Quantal theory of speech (original) (raw)
The quantal theory of speech is a phonetic answer to one of the fundamental questions of phonology, specifically: if each language community is free to arbitrarily select a system of phonemes or segments, then why are the phoneme inventories of different languages so similar? For example, almost all languages have the stop consonants /p/, /t/, /k/, and almost all have the vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/. Other phonemes differ considerably among languages, but not nearly as much as they would if each language were free to choose arbitrarily.
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| dbo:abstract | The quantal theory of speech is a phonetic answer to one of the fundamental questions of phonology, specifically: if each language community is free to arbitrarily select a system of phonemes or segments, then why are the phoneme inventories of different languages so similar? For example, almost all languages have the stop consonants /p/, /t/, /k/, and almost all have the vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/. Other phonemes differ considerably among languages, but not nearly as much as they would if each language were free to choose arbitrarily. Proposed by Ken Stevens at MIT, quantal theory formalizes the intuition that some speech sounds are easier to produce than others. Sounds that are easier to reliably produce, in the formal way described below, are more common among the languages of the world; those that are harder to reliably produce are less common. (en) |
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| dbo:wikiPageWikiLink | dbr:Phonemes dbr:MIT dbr:Phonetic dbr:Phonology dbc:Phonetics dbr:Kenneth_N._Stevens dbr:Phoneme |
| dbp:wikiPageUsesTemplate | dbt:More_footnotes dbt:Reflist |
| dcterms:subject | dbc:Phonetics |
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| rdfs:comment | The quantal theory of speech is a phonetic answer to one of the fundamental questions of phonology, specifically: if each language community is free to arbitrarily select a system of phonemes or segments, then why are the phoneme inventories of different languages so similar? For example, almost all languages have the stop consonants /p/, /t/, /k/, and almost all have the vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/. Other phonemes differ considerably among languages, but not nearly as much as they would if each language were free to choose arbitrarily. (en) |
| rdfs:label | Quantal theory of speech (en) |
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