Expectancy and the Perception of Syllables

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.