P r e p r i n t No.

57

C l a s s i f i c a t i o n : D 1.3

THE MEASUREMENT OF P H O N E T I C SIMILARITY

Peter Ladefoged

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THE MEASURE~NT OF PHONETIC SIMILARITY

Peter Ladefoged
University of California, Los Angeles

There are many reasc~s for wanting to measure the degree of phoaetic similarity between members of a group of languages or dialects.

The

present study grew out of a research project which was designed to get
data that might have a bearing on some of the practical problems which
exist in Uganda.

In the Southern part of Uganda, where two thirds of

the nine million people live, there are numerous closely related Bantu
languages or dialects.
languages.

The official Ugandan census data lists 15 Bantu

The current study uses data on these and six others.

We

wanted to assess their phonetic similarity so that there would be data

on which to base decisions on which languages to use for broadcasting
(the government currently broadcasts in 8 or 9 of these languages, as
well as in i0 non-Bantu languages), which to use in schools (3 are used
officially and a further 5 unofficially, but with the connivance of the
local education authorities), and which for other purposes.
One method of obtaining a measure might have been by devising a
metric that could be applied to formal comparisons of phonological
descriptions of each of these languages.
largely because of time limitations.

This method was not attempted,

The data had to be collected and

first analyses made within a period of one year.

Furthermore, it soon

appeared that the sound patterns of nearly all of these languages were
very similar, and the phonological descriptions would have to be eXtremely detailed before systematic differences became apparent.

Finally,

before we could quauti~j, in practical terms, the overall degree of phonetic similarity between a pair of languages, the phonological descripticas would have to be supported by counts of the frequency of occurrence of each rule.

A difference between two languages due to, s ~ ,

the addition of a rule in one but not the other would be more or less
important depending on the number of times in which the rule was involved
in ordinary utterances.
The technique which we chose to use instead was to measure the
degree of phonetic similarity in a list of 30 co-,,on words in each language, all of which were historically cognate forms in at least 16 out
of the 20 languages.

The list was a subset of a list of lO0 words which

had been recorded so that lexico-statistical comparisons might be made.

The

complete lists had been recorded in a narrow phonetic transcription

by the author,

u~ing IPA symbols except for the voiced and voiceless

palatal affricates, which Were transcribed

with the conventions of Ugaudan orthographies.

and

in accordance

Long vowels and long

consonants (both of which are phonemic in sone of these languages) were

transcribed with double letters.

Tones were transcribed by acute accents

(high), grave accents (low) and circumflex accents (falling); as far as

is known these possibilities will account for nearly all the tonal contrasts that occur in these languages.

Table 1 exemplifies the data for

two words in each of the 20 languages.

The fundamental problem in making phonetic comparisons is how to
line up two words, one in one dialect and one,in another, in such a ws~
that we can make a valid point by point comparison of all the things
which affect phonetic similarity.

In the Bantu languages with which we

were concerned, each noun consists of a stem, and a prefix indicating

the noun class.

Only the stems were used in these phonetic comparisons.

In general, a stem begins with a consonant, C, followed by a vowel, V,

and may contain additional alternations of consonants and vowels.
commonest form is CVCV.

The

Some problems in lining up segments will be

considered after we have considered how they may be compared.

There have been a number of attempts to devise measures of the
degree of phonetic similarity of isolated segments.

Some of these have

been based on experimental studies showing, for instance, the degree of

confusability of different segments (Miller and Nicely 1955, Peters 1963,
Wickelgren 1965, 1966, Klatt 1968, Greenberg and Jenkins 1962, Mohr and
Wang 1968); others have been based on more theoretical arguments (Austin
1957, Peterson and Harary 1961).

All of these are of interest here, in

that the knowledge of the degree of phonetic similarity between segments

is a necessary prerequisite to a statement about the degree of phonetic
similarity of languages as a whole.
Some of the studies cited above have discussed the possibility of
quantifying the degree of difference between segments by counting the
number of differences in their specifications in terms of features.
Various ways of specifying segments in terms of features have been suggested, the most important being the early distinctive feature system
of Jakobson, Fant, and Halle (1951), its revision by Jakobson and Halle
(1956), and the system proposed by Chomsky and Halle (1968).

All these

features sets are intended for classifying the segments which occur in
phonemic or phonological contrasts within a language.

But it is by no

means obvious that the specification of the phonetic level in the way
suggested by Chc~sky and Halle, for instance, is directly related to the
specification of the kind of phonetic similarity measure which is useful
in cross language studies.

Chomsky and Halle were certainly not trying

to produce a phonetic specification of this kind.

Accordingly for the

purposes of the present study an ad hoc set of phonetic features was

used.
For the sake of computational simplicity, the phonetic features were
considered to be independent binary categories.

This is obviously an

invalid assumption which will be discussed further towards the end of

this paper.

Because vowels were being compared only with vowels, and

consonants only with consonants, there was no need for features such as
consonantal

and vocalic; they would never have contributed anything to

the cross language comparisons.

Furthermore there was no need to use

the same features for both consonants and vowels.

The feature system

which was set up was adequate for specifying all the phonetic differences
which had been observed sunnng Ugandan Bantu languages and seemed, on the
basis of the experimental studies cited above, likely to be the best
possible measure of segment similarity within the constraints previously
noted.
Each consonant segment in a Ugandan Bantu language was described as
being, or not being:

(i) a stop; (2) a nasal; (3) a fricative; (4) an.

terior -- made in the front of the mouth; (5) alveolar -- made near the
teeth ridge; (6) coronal -- made in the centr~ of the mouth; (7) voiced;
(8) long; (9) followed by a w-glide; (i0) followed by a y-glide.

The

easiest way of appreciating the way in which these terms were used is

through the examples showing the partial characterization

nants given in Tables 2 and 3.

of some ~ o -

A plus sign indicates the presence ~

feature, and a minus sign shows its absence.

The degree of similarity between segments is exemplified in T s ~
Thus
5Y

and

have nine out of the ten points in common; and

~.
=~

differ in seven points, and have only three points in cc~amon.

In one or two details this measure is not entirely satisfactory.

There is no reason why

cow,non with

should be considered to have seven points ~n

and only six points in common with

important, there is no reason why

similarity with

b ,

d ,

h
d- .

r ; and, what i~

should have such varying degz1~s ~

These anomalies occur becauBe

ments were specified in terms of independent binary categories.

Wi~l~

classification system of this kind it is impossible to give a specif~ca.tion of

which is e q u u Z ~

different from all the stop consonants.

these inequities probably did not have a significant effect.

2,400 segments compared,

Among

occurred only 31 times.

In specifying the vowels we stated whether each one was, or was ~ . (i) high; (2) mid; (3) low; (4) front; (5) central; (6) back; (7) long~
(8) high tone;
(i0) low tone.

(9) falling tone.

At one time we added the possibilitlr.-

But preliminary results showed that this gave too much

importance to tonal similarity, and it was better to consider low to~e

as simply the absence of high or falling tone.

The degree of similark~r

in vowels was measured by counting the number of features they had in

common, in the same way as for consonants.
Using this measure of the ~[egree of phonetic similarity, the features in each segment were compared with the corresponding features in

the corresponding segment in each of 30 words in each of the 20 Bantu

languages.

The 144,000 comparisons involved, the st,ms indicatingthe

degree of phonetic similarity of each pair of languages, and the tabulations were all done on a cumputer.
A number of problems arose in the comparison of specific segments,
two of which will be considered here.

Both are due to the constraint

of having to compare words segment by segment, a constraint which is

necessary only because of the difficulties of formalizing the comparisons in any other way.
The first was that not all the stems to be compared were the same
length.

For exe~ple, the stem in the word for 'ear' has the form - ~

or -~wf in many of these languages; but in two languages it is disyllabic,

being either - t ~ y f

or -t~yf.

One might guess that these are the older

forms, and there has been some kind of shortening process in all the
other languages.

The solution that was adopted was to add dummy seg-

msnts with entirely negative feature values to all the languages having
a monosyllabic form.

This did not affect the similarity measure within

the monosyllabic group of languages ; and it made the two languages having
disyllabic forms more similar to the monosyllabic group than they would
have been to another language which had a different second syllable.
The second problem arose when a phonetic feature such as palatalization was realized in one language in a consonant and in another in a
vowel.

The word for 'crocodile', for example, often has a stem of the

form - g 6 6 ~ ~ but sometimes, instead of the p~latal nasal, the form is

-g6fn~.

Note that if these two forms were lined up so that the conso-

nants were compared only with the consonants and the vowels only with

the vowels, then there would be differences in both the last vowel and
the last consonant.

Consequently this pair would be counted as less

similar than a pair such as -g6~n~ and - g 6 ~ .

result.

This is not a desirable

It was avoided by an ad hoc solution in which

-in

was arbi-

trarily specified as a consonant differing in one feature from the

palatal nasal

p .

Note also that the problem is not avoided by using

the same features for consonants and vowels~ it is simply a matter of

the lining up of the segments to be compared.
The ad hoc approaches discussed above are, of course, unsatisfactory.

They were adopted simply in the interests of expediency.

Work

is continuing on a better formalization of the problem of comparing

whole words, but so far without success.

Meanwhile, a computer program

has been written which compares the features in each segment in each
word in e~ch language with the corresponding features in each word in
every other language.

The sums indicating the degree of phonetic

similarity of each pair of languages are printed out in matrix form.

The results for this particular group of 20 Ugandan languages are not
particularly relevant here~ they are given in detail elsewhere (Criper,
Glick,and Ladefoged, forthcoming).

It is sufficient to note that the

relationships revealed suggested plausible and interesting groupings

into dialect clusters.
What is of more interest here is the validation of the claim that
this technique measures phonetic similarity between languages.

We

attempted to do this in two ways, first by assessing local opinion

concerning the degree of similarity between one language and another,
and secondly by testing the extent to which people actually understand

other languages

The first of the6e two methods did not produce reliable

data; different local experts gave different figures, and even the ssme
man gave different estimates when the questions were put to him in a
slightly different ws~ on different occasions.
duced limited but valid data.

The second method pro-

The procedures are described in full

elsewhere (Criper, Glick, and Ladefoged, forthcoming).

tests with speakers of two different languages.

We conducted

For each of these lan-

guages we used five groups of speakers, and pls~ed them recordings of

stories in their own and four other languages, rotating stories, languages, and groups in a Latin square design.

The group scores in

answering questions about these stories were subjected to an analysis

of variance, which showed that there were no significant differences
between any of the listening groups, or between auy of the stories ; but
there were very significant differences in the comprehension of the
different languages.

We therefore had valid scores on the co~rehension

of two languages relative to four other languages.

These eight scores

were compared with the degrees of phonetic similarity of the corresponding

pairs of languages end, provided one score was left out for reasons
discussed below, a high correlation was found (r = 0.98).
It is virtually impossible to test the relative comprehension of
all possible pairs of a large number of languages, because of the complexities in the experimental design which are necessary.

But it would

appear that, at least in the case of these Ugandan Bantu languages,

valid predictions ms~ be made on the basis of the phonetic similarity
measure described above.

There are, however, circumstances in which

our predictions would be wrong.

The degree of comprehension of one

language to another is not always a reversible relationship~ speakers

of a prestige language do not understand a minor l~uguage as well as
speakers of the minor language understand the prestige language.
is this discrepancy which a c c o s t s

It

for our having to leave out one

score in order t o get a high correlation as described above.

Phonetic

similarity is a good predictor of intelligibility only if questions

of prestige are not involved.
Finally we must consider w ~ s

in which we could improve the

metric used for comparing the phonetic similarity of segments.

Perhaps

the mo~t obvious improvement is to allow for variations in the importance

of different features.

The experimental studies cited above generally

agree in finding that differences in manner of articulation contribute

more to perceptual distance than differences in voicing, and both contribute more than differences in place of articulation.

Accordingly

features must be assigned different weights.

The situation is, however, more complicated.
for the interaction of features.

We must also allow

For example, the experimental studies

cited above have shown that there is a greater difference between the
members of the set
the set

pa - ta - ka

than there is between the members of

b8 - ds - 9.~ ; and the members of the set

are even less different from one another.

ma - na - ~8

Consequently differences in

place of articulationD however coded, must be made to have less effect

when the feature voiced is also present; and even less effect when the
feature nasal is also present.
It seems that it would also be advisable to allow for non-binary
specifications of features.

Multivalued feature specifications can be

l0

treated in either of two wssrs.

In one way, each value is regarded as

b e i n g equally different from all others.

p ,

~ ,

c ,

Thus if the consonants

are assigned the values l, 2, 3, 4 on a feature of

articulatory place, they will each be regarded as being c~e point different from each other with respect to this feature, assuming it has
been given a weight of 1.

Alternatively multivalued specifications can ~

be treated as scalar quantities.

vowels

i ,

e ,

are specified as having the values l, 2, 3 on a

feature of vowel height, then

from

and

a , but

I f this is done and, for example, the

and

e would be counted as one point different

a

would be two points different from

each other (assuming this feature has a weight of 1).

specified as l, 2, 7 then

If they had been

would have been three points from

and

and the~ w o u l d have been six points different from each other.
The use of independent multivalued feature specifications allows
us to correct an anc~aly which was mentioned above.

It will be re-

membered that using the previous system it was impossible t o specify

in a way such that it was equally different from all stop consonants.
But if place of articulation is an independent multivalued feature, and
if

is assigned a value different from any of the stop consonants,

then it can be made equally different from all of them.

In other words,

this type of specification allows us to formalize within the metric the

notion of an irrelevant feature.
A computer program has now been written which compares segments
which may be specified in terms of weighted, interacting, multivalued,
independent or scalar, features.

It is hoped that results of experiments

using this program will be available for reporting to the conference.

ii

References
Austin, W.M. (1957) 'Criteria for phonetic similarity' Language 33,
538-~3.
Ch~msky, A.N. and Halle, M. (1968) The Sound Pattern of English
Harper and Row, New York, New York.
Criper, C., Glick, R., and Ladefoged, P. (forthcoming) Lang~ge in
Ug~a.
Greenberg, J.H. and Jenkins, J..T. (1964) 'Studies in the psychological
correlates to the sound system of American English' Word 20, No. 2,
157-77.
Jakobson, R., Fant, G., and Halle, M. (1951) Pr~iminca~es to Speech
Analysis (sixth printing, 1965) Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T. Press.
Jakobson, R. and Halle, M. (1956) Fundaz~ntaZ8 of LangUage Mouton,
The Hague.
Klatt, D.H. (1968) 'Structure of confusions in short-term memory between
English consonants' J. Acoust. Soc. Amer. 44, No. 2, 401-7,
Miller, G.A. and Nicely, P.E. (1955) 'An analysis of perceptusl confusions among same English consonants' J. Acoumt. Soc. Amer.
27, 338-52.
Mohr, B. and Wang, W. (1968) 'Perceptual distance and the specification
of phonological features' Phonetica 18, 31-45.
Peters, R.W. (1963) 'Dimensions of perception for consonants' J. Acoust.
Soc. Amer. 35, 1985-9.
Peterson, G.E. and Harary, F. (1961) 'Foundations of phonemic theory' in
Structure of Language and its Mathematical Aspects (ed. R. Jakobson)
American Mathematical Society, Providence, Rhode Island.
Wickelgren, W.A. (1965) 'Distinctive features and errors in short-term
memory for English vowels' J. Acoust. Soc. Amer. 38, 583-8.
Wickelgren, W.A. (1966) 'Distinctive features snd errors in short-term
memory for English consonants' J. Acoust. Soc. Amer. 39, 388-98.

Table i:

Phonetic transcriptions of the words for 'bee' end 'bone'

in 20 Ugandan Bantu languages. IPA symbols ere used,
except that j and c are used for the voiced and voiceless palatal affricates. Doubled letters denote long
sounds. The stems (which are all that were used in the
cmmparisons) are separated from the noun class prefixes
by a vertical line.

'bee '

Language

Lumas ab a
Lunyole
Lus amia
Lugwe
Lugwere
Lukenyi
Lus oga
Luganda
Ruruli
Runyoro
Rut ooro
Ruhororo
Rut agwenda

n
n

j
j

n
n

kf
kf
kf
k 1

~
6
$
$

&

cf

6
6
6

kl
kl
cl

1
1
1

ts

xf

(}

kl

kf

Ru~rm~ore
Ruki ga
Lubwi s i
RukonJo
Rugungu
Runyarwauda
Rwamba

b
b
b
~

k~

6 kl
u c1
b ki
~ kl
~kl

mb

~J~ mb
k ~J~ mb
k uu mb
g
g
g
9g
9
g
g
g

I|

,J h i

kf
,',hi'
~ h f

'bone '

l
|
|
'
l

~rl

t
I
n

~mb~
6b mb
,'.',mb
'~ mb
~ mb
~ f
~ f
6 f
~ mb
~ f
,~ f
6 w

~
~
~
~
~
~

k 6 h
k ~ h
9k, u f

~
~
~

,~

Table 2:

Example

The classification of the places of articulation required

for the description of Ugaudan Bantu languages.

Phcaeti c
term

Characteristic Features
anterior
alveolar
corcmal

labial

dental

alveolar

d-

post alveolar

prep alat al

velar

Table 3:

Example

n
nz

The classification of some manners of articulation required

for the descriptiom of Ugasdan Bantu languages.

Phonetic
term

Features
fricative

nasal

prenas al
fricative
prenasal
stop
stop

affri care

fricative

approximaut

nd

Characteristic
nasal
stop

Table 4:

The degree of similarity between some ccasonant segments

in U g ~ d ~ B ~ t u l ~ a g e s .
d- j

dY dW d: dz z

nz I

9 8 7 7 9 7 7 7 7 6 5 7 6 7 5

sY ~Y

43

9 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 7 6 8 7 6 6 5 5 4
d

d-

9 7 7 9 9 9 9 8 7 9 8 5 7 6 6 5
8 8 8 8 8 8 7 6 8 9 6 6 7 5 6

86668'

7 6 6 7 6 6 7 5 6
6

dY

8 8 8 7 6 8 7 4 6 5 7 6

dw

8 8 7 6 8 7 4 6 5 5 4

d:

8 7 6 8 7 4 6 5 5 4

dz
z

9 8 8 7

8 7 7 6

9 9 8 5 9 8 8 7

nz

8 7 4 8 7 7 6

I,

9 6 8 7 7 6

7 7 8 6 7

h
s

6 7 5 6
9 9 8

89
sY