Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T11:01:46.536Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Contrast and perceptual distinctiveness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2009

Bruce Hayes
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Robert Kirchner
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
Donca Steriade
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Get access

Summary

Introduction

Most ‘phonetically driven’ or functionalist theories of phonology propose that two of the fundamental forces shaping phonology are the need to minimise effort on the part of the speaker and the need to minimise the likelihood of confusion on the part of the listener. The goal of this chapter is to explore the perceptual side of this story, investigating the general character of the constraints imposed on phonology by the need to minimise confusion.

The need to avoid confusion is hypothesised to derive from the communicative function of language. Successful communication depends on listeners being able to recover what a speaker is saying. Therefore it is important to avoid perceptually confusable realisations of distinct categories; in particular, distinct words should not be perceptually confusable. The phonology of a language regulates the differences that can minimally distinguish words, so one of the desiderata for a phonology is that it should not allow these minimal differences, or contrasts, to be too subtle perceptually. In Optimality-Theoretic terms, this means that there are constraints favouring less confusable contrasts over more confusable contrasts.

There is nothing new about the broad outlines of this theory (cf. Lindblom 1986, 1990; Martinet 1955; Zipf 1949; among others), but it has important implications for the nature of phonology. First, it gives a central role to the auditoryperceptual properties of speech sounds, since distinctiveness of contrasts is dependent on perceptual representation of speech sounds. This runs counter to the articulatory bias in phonological feature theory observed in Chomsky and Halle 1968 and its successors.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×