Feature economy is a principle of sound systems according to which languages tend to
maximise the ratio of sounds over features. The major goal of this study is to confirm the …

Contrary to what non-practitioners might expect, the systems of phonetic notation used by
linguists are highly idiosyncratic. Not only do various linguistic subfields disagree on the …

As linguists have long noted, not just any set of consonants and vowels can make up a
phonological inventory. 1 A central finding of the earliest work in phonology was that speech …

Despite the fact that phonology has historically been integral to the development of modern
approaches to linguistic theory and typology (Greenberg et al. 1978; Hockett 1955; …

Rhotics, or r-sounds, are known to display a large amount of variation, both cross-
linguistically and within particular languages. Dutch is an example of such a language: even …

This paper examines similarity measures based on acoustic and articulatory data from a set
of crosslinguistically frequent consonants and vowels, and compares this phonetic similarity …

This paper discusses the widely held idea that the building blocks of languages (features,
categories, and architectures) are part of an innate blueprint for Human Language, and …

Linguistics, and typology in particular, can have a bright future. We justify this optimism by
discussing comparability from two angles. First, we take the opportunity presented by this …

The distribution of variants of the face and goat vowels in Tyneside English (TE) is assessed
with reference to the age, sex, and social class of 32 adult TE speakers. The effects of …

For over a century, the phoneme has played a central role in linguistic research. In recent
years, collections of phoneme inventories, originally designed for cross-linguistic purposes …