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Expectancy and the Perception of Syllables

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Roger W. Brown and
Donald C. Hildum
Roger W. Brown
Affiliation:
Harvard University
Donald C. Hildum
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

The phonemes of a language are categories defined for the native speaker by acoustic and functional attributes. Workers at the Haskins and Bell Telephone laboratories have tried to specify the acoustic invariants of particular phonemes of American English; they have usually worked with single vowel allophones, and with the first three formants in the spectrograms of these allophones. Jakobson and his co-workers, drawing on these acoustic studies and on familiar articulational analyses, have proposed that the phonemes of English can be specified in terms of a small number of acoustic-articulational attributes having binary values. Each phoneme of English is said to be a unique bundle of such distinctive features. In all this, nothing is said about the functional attributes of phonemes.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 32 , Issue 3: July-September , September 1956, pp. 411 - 419
Copyright
Copyright © 1956 by the Linguistic Society of America

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References

1 Brown has presented this psychological view of the phoneme in considerable detail in his appendix to the forthcoming book by Jerome Bruner, Jacqueline Goodnow, and George Austin, A study of thinking (New York, 1956).

The research on which the present paper is based was supported by the Laboratory of Social Relations, Harvard University.

2 Preliminaries to speech analysis (Cambridge, Mass., 1952).

3 Language (New York, 1933).

4 For a listing of two-member consonant clusters that occur and of clusters that do not occur initially in the word or utterance, and also for a specification of English phonemes in terms of six distinctive features, we have drawn on mimeographed materials distributed by Jones in a linguistics course at Harvard, and on the same author's section (Visual message presentation, pp. 9–21) in Part I of Final Report Contract AE 19 (122)—17 item I, 5 Feb. 1954.

5 The teacher's word book of 30,000 words (New York, 1944).