Phonetic space is the range of sounds that can be made by an individual.[1] There is some controversy over whether an individual's phonetic space is language dependent, or if there exists some common, innate, phonetic space across languages.[2]
Phonetic Space is a concept pioneered by Martin Joos in 1948[3] and developed by Gordon E. Peterson in 1951[4] and Noam Chomsky in 1968.[5] Chomsky developed the idea that phonetic space is universal and every human is born with a discrete phonetic space.[5] The most cited rebuttal of Chomsky's proposal of a universal and discrete phonetic space is an article by Port and Leary titled, "Against Formal Phonology".[6] Applications of phonetic space include interlanguage phonetic comparison and phonological analysis.[2]
^Port, Robert F. (October 1981). "On the structure of the phonetic space with special reference to speech timing". Lingua. 55 (2–3): 181–219. doi:10.1016/0024-3841(81)90062-0.
^ abSingh, Anil Kumar, Taraka Rama, and Pradeep Dasigi. "A Computational Model of the Phonetic Space and Its Applications."