professor of German. Joos contributed much to the realm of phonetics and phonology, writing the monograph that helped linguists come to a more unified theory regarding acoustics in phonetics. The concept would later be expanded on by Gordon E. Peterson in his essay, ‘The Phonetic Value of Vowels’. Along with these contributions, Marshall McLuhan could be mentioned as well, as he was the one to truly consider acoustic space, which is very similar to phonetic space. Though not exactly the same, as acoustic space refers more to the environment that allows for the sound, while phonetic space is more niche, in that it is in reference to the space between sounds. On a surface level they may not seem related, but it is worth the mention even if nothing is directly attributed to McLuhan. Major contributors Martin Joos was an American linguist who was most commonly known for his study on language formality. Though Joos didn't solely study phonetic space, he contributed to the field of Acoustic Phonetics through his journal entry Acoustic Phonetics and Readings in Linguistics. Gordon E. Peterson was an American linguist whose field of study varied from acoustic analysis to phonemic theory and automatic speech recognition. Though Peterson didn't explicitly study phonetic space, in his study of phonetic value, he concluded that the vowel diagram that linguists typically use is a two-dimensional representation of the vowels in the phonetic space, which is multi-dimensional. Noam Chomsky is a prominent American linguist who pioneered the idea of an innate universal grammar, which also ties into his idea that phonetic space is also universally innate. Applications In 2010, a study on Phonetic Space was done to determine if phonetic spaces do exist and differ speaker to speaker. Three groups of participants were tested: those who were born and raised in China, those who moved from China at an early age and Americans who have learned Chinese later in life. Subjects were recorded saying various sounds and analyzed thorough Praat, a computer software that measures sounds into Hz. The various frequencies are grouped into Formants which correlate to certain sounds in the proposed phonetic space. The recorded values for the sounds of heritage speakers and non heritage speakers differed greatly. The averages show that the phonetic space, or values of sound, differ between the three groups. See also Acoustic phonetics Vowel References External links The Phonetic Value of Vowels Phonology