Quantitative methods for comparing featural representations

The basic representational hypothesis in phonology is that segments are coded using a universal set of discrete features. We propose a method for quantitatively measuring how well such features align with arbitrary segment representations. We assess articulatory, spectral, and phonotactic representations of English consonants. Our procedure constructs a concrete representation of a feature in terms of the pairs it distinguishes, and can be extended to any pair of representations to test the consistency of one with the individual dimensions of the other. We validate the method on our phonetic representations and then show that major natural classes are not well represented in the surface phonotactics.