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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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This paper compares two approaches to the study of sound inventories, one phonological and the other phonetic. The first maintains that speech sounds tend to be organized by a principle of feature economy, according to which languages maximize the combinatory possibilities of a few phonological features to generate large numbers of speech sounds. The other holds that sound systems are organized by a principle of maximal dispersion, according to which speech sounds tend to be maximally dispersed in perceptual space. A comparison of these two principles with respect to the UPSID-92 data base of phoneme inventories provides strong support for the first.
Bibliographic reference. Clements, G. N. (2003): "Feature economy as a phonological universal", In ICPhS-15, 371-374.