Phonology Assistant 3

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	3.0.1
Developer	SIL International
Supported	free
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) COMMON: Common Tasks and Foundational Technologies/Utilities Stores data in a standardized XML format
Interface Language	English
License	Freeware
Download Page	http://www.sil.org/computing/pa/pa_download.htm
Website	http://www.sil.org/computing/pa/index.htm
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