Distinctive Features - Speech Resource Pages - Macquarie University

unaspirated sounds are produced without this gesture." (HC) [+spread]
refers to aspirated consonants, breathy voiced or murmured consonants,
voiceless vowels, voiceless approximants. [-spread] refers to all other
sounds. It should be stressed that during the occlusion of both voiceless
aspirated and voiceless unaspirated (0 VOT) stops the glottis is open. The
difference is during the period following release where, for aspirated stops,
the glottis stays open much longer than for unaspirated stops.
19. constricted glottis / non-constricted glottis [constr]: "Constricted
or glottalized sounds are produced with the vocal cords drawn together,
preventing normal vocal cord vibration; nonconstricted (nonglottalized)
sounds are produced without such a gesture." (HC) [+constr] refers to
ejectives, implosives, glottalized or laryngealised consonants, glottalized or
laryngealised vowels. [-constr] refers to all other sounds.
20. voiced / voiceless [voice]: "Voiced sounds are produced with a
laryngeal configuration permitting periodic vibration of the vocal cords;
voiceless sounds lack such periodic vibration." (HC) [+voice] refers to all
voiced sounds. [-voice] refers to all voiceless sounds.
6. Australian English Vowel Features
a) Australian English Monophthong Vowels
When Chomsky and Halle were using their system of Distinctive Features to
analyse American English vowels, they argued that it was necessary to define
three levels of height:-
1. high [+high] [-low]
2. mid [-high] [-low]
3. low [-high] [+low]
but only two levels of fronting:-
1. front [-back]
2. back [+back]
Whilst its not impossible to describe Australian English vowels in terms of [high,
low, back, round, tense] so that all monophthongs are provided with a unique
featural specification the resulting system doesn't match the phonetics of
Australian English vowels. In each category, front, central and back there are
several vowels. To call both the central and the back vowels [+back] doesn't
capture this pattern satisfactorily. For example, the vowel /ʉː/ has been moving
forward over several decades and for most speakers its a high, central, rounded
vowel. For some speakers it has moved even further forward (half way between
central and front), but isn't yet a front rounded vowel. It makes a lot of sense to
regard this as a high rounded vowel that isn't explicitly front or back (i.e. [-front,
-back]).
So now we can define three degree of vowel fronting:-
1. front [+front, -back]
2. central [-front, -back]
3. back [-front, +back]
As stated (and justified) in the previous section, we don't use a length feature
(e.g. [long]) to indicate the distinction between long and short monophthongs.
We can instead refer to long vowels (and diphthongs) as tense and short vowels