Phonological Rule - Characteristics

Characteristics

Hayes (2009) lists the following characteristics that all phonological rules have in common:

• Language specificity: A phonological rule that is present in one language may not be present in other languages, or even in all dialects of a given language.
• Productivity: Phonological rules apply even to new words. For example, if an English speaker is asked to pronounce the plural of the nonsense word "wug" (i.e. "wugs"), they pronounce the final s as, not, even though they have never used the word before. (This kind of test is called the wug test.)
• Untaught and unconscious: Speakers apply these rules without being aware of it, and they acquire the rules early in life without any explicit teaching.
• Intuitive: The rules give speakers intuitions about what words are "well-formed" or "acceptable"; if a speaker hears a word that does not conform to the language's phonological rules, the word will sound foreign or ill-formed.