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Phonology Assistant 3

Fri, 10/02/2009 - 04:16 — dhigby
Your rating: None Average: 3.9 (12 votes)

This program keeps track of phonetic data either typed directly in or drawn from one or more data sources (Toolbox, Fieldworks Language Explorer, Speech Analyzer files with transcriptions, and/or XML data that can be tranformed to PAXML). If sound files are included in the source data, the user can listen to them directly in Phonology Assistant. PA has many analytical features, such as

  • Creates a phone inventory
  • Compares relative frequencies of phones
  • Computes syllable structures
  • Generates phonotactic charts for all combinations of positions, phones, or features
  • Finds minimal pairs

The user can search and manipulate the date in many useful ways, and the powerful search function allows the user to search for phonetic patterns within within specified environments.

Data can be marked as uncertain if the transcription is in doubt, and uncertain data can optionally be marked in charts and wordlists.

Charts are flexible and allow columns and rows to be added or deleted, and phones can be placed where the user wants them to appear.  The following charts are available:

  • All phones found.
  • Histogram of the frequencies of phones
  • Y charts: All phonetic data items containing a particular phonetic segment, sorting preceding and following contexts from left to right or right to left.
  • XY charts: display rows of search items and columns of search environments. Each cell displays the number of occurrences of an item in an environment. Chart definitions can be saved for easy re-use.

Charts and search results can be exported as HTML or RTF for incorporation into web pages or pasting into documents.

For a detailed review, see the Reviews tab.

Version

 3.3.2

Developer

 SIL International

Supported
free

SIL Status
Supported

Supported Operating Systems

 Windows, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista

Unicode Support
Yes

Suitable tasks
  • LINGUISTICS
  • Identify all sounds in the phone inventory and disambiguate ambiguous sequences
  • Organize all phonemes into an inventory and find contrasting pairs to support this analysis
  • Identify syllable structure templates and verify that the data corpus does not violate them
  • Publish linguistic data (e.g. phonetic data and interlinear texts)
  • LITERACY
  • Identify the most common phonemes (to be used in the earliest primers)
  • GENERAL TASKS
  • Store data in a standardized XML format

Interface Language
English

License
Freeware

Download Page
Latest Stable Version
Test Version

Website
http://phonologyassistant.sil.org

User Group

Screenshots
Phonology assistant screenshot

Comments

Comment viewing options

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highly recommended: safe, compatible and low-maintenance

languist - 11/09/2009 - 14:01
5
I've posted a full review under the Reviews tab.

Powerful & Mysterious...

toddho - 11/11/2010 - 09:20
3
A coworker of mine is so excited about what this tool can do for her. I can see on her laptop that PA can do some really powerful/helpful things, and she wanted to help me experience that, too. But we ran into problems when I tried it. I got SpeechAnalyzer to transcribe some audio data, then I selected & saved a portion of the WAV file (only worked if the original file was small). But when I add that saved file as a data source in PA, I end up with no data! If I export the transcription data from SA to an SFM file, then add that as a data source in PA, I assign all the fields (using Properties), but I still get "no data". However, after I clicked in another app & came back, suddenly the data was there! Hence, the mystery... What does it actually take to get PA & SA to play nice together? I'm sure I'll experience the power as I have opportunity to use it more... What I would have hoped is that PA would give me some kind of progress bar for loading the data, or some status message other than "no data", so I wouldn't give up hope too soon. One big disappointment is that I could find no mention of a user forum for discussing the program's features & how to get the most out of it... SIL's web site lists PA among its "Supported" software, but I saw no means for getting support for it! (Telling users to read the ReadMe file is not really support in my opinion...)

the excited coworker

Annie - 12/13/2010 - 23:40
4
I'm the excited coworker mentioned in the comment by toddho; Indeed I have had only good things to say about PA, which is doing for me everything I hate about phonology (everything monotonous and tedious) while allowing me to do the fun stuff (seeing the patterns, analyzing, defining search patterns). I have successfully helped two other colleagues make use of PA, notwithstanding Todd's computer's problem with PA not working for him. I agree with Todd that we need computer support! Discussion board! Now we've run into the problem of Phonology Assistant not communicating with new Fieldworks version, and the PA update not working on some computers. -Annie


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