Phonetic feature theory: The linguist, the speech scientist and the speech pathologist

Abstract

In recent years the idea has caught on that the speech sound should no longer be regarded as the smallest unit of phonetic analysis but should instead be replaced by the feature. A speech sound may be regarded as a set of features, each related to some accepted parameter of speech (either articulatorg or acoustic), such as voicing or stridency. Phonetic features have generated a great deal of interest among linguists, psycholinguists, psychophysicists, researchers in speech perception and speech production, and speech and language pathologists. The feature concept has also generated its share of controversy. Speech scientists have criticized linguists for failing to incorporate correctly the findings of experimental phonetics into their theories (Lisker and Abramson, 1971), while linguists have criticized phoneticians for failing to recognize the abstract nature of phonological descriptions. Postal (quoted in Chomsky and Halle, 1968, p. 293) says: “The phonetic transcription is the most gross and superficial aspect of linguistic structure. It is the most important but far from the only parameter determining the actual acoustic shape of the tokens of the sentence.” While emphasizing the abstractness of linguistic constructs such as features and phonetic transcriptions, the claim is also made that these constructs have an immediate relevance to the linguistic performance of human beings: “The total set of features is identical with the set of phonetic properties that can in principle be controlled in speech; they represent the phonetic capabilities of man” (Chomsky and Halle, 1968, p. 294-295). While most researchers in speech and language pathology have found a feature framework valuable as a descriptive and even as a therapeutic tool (Menyuk, 1968; McReynolds and Huston, 1971; McReynolds and Bennett, 1972; Pollack and Rees, 1972), it has come under attack by Walsh (1974). Walsh’s position seems to be that since the constructs of linguistics do not correspond to physical reality, they are of no value to the investigator of speech phenomena. Walsh apparently believes