The theory of distinctive features, advanced by Jakobson, Fant, and Halle (1952, 1956) has its origins in acoustics, the psychology of speech perception, and boolean algebra[22]. Distinctive features are the basic elements of speech-sound production. For instance, the features are vocalic/nonvocalic, compact/diffuse, tense/lax, nasal/oral, discontinuous/continuous, strident/mellow, grave/acute, sharp/plain, and so on. By systematically combining a relatively small number of distinctive features, all the phonemes of a language can be generated. Singh (1976) reported that human beings begin to learn the contrasts of features which contribute to differences in sound production and which, in turn, contribute to differences in word meaning. The distinctive features have been proposed as a possible model for human speech perception and also as a tool in automatic speech recognition. As an instruction concept, it can be expected to help the learners who are having difficulty making L2 sounds.
