Feature Economy as a Phonological Universal

International audienceThis paper compares two approaches to the study of sound inventories, one phonological and the other phonetic. The first maintains that speech sounds tend to be organized by a principle of feature economy, according to which languages maximize the combinatory possibilities of a few phonological features to generate large numbers of speech sounds. The other holds that sound systems are organized by a principle of maximal dispersion, according to which speech sounds tend to be maximally dispersed in perceptual space. A comparison of these two principles with respect to the UPSID-92 data base of phoneme inventories provides strong support for the first