The Sound Pattern of English

The Sound Pattern of English (frequently referred to as SPE) is a 1968 work on phonology (a branch of linguistics) by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle.

Chomsky and Halle present a view of phonology as a linguistic subsystem, separate from other components of the grammar, that transforms an underlying phonemic sequence according to rules and produces as its output the phonetic form that is uttered by a speaker.

Derivatives of the theory have made modifications by changing the inventory of segmental features, considering some to be absent rather than having a positive or negative value, or adding complexity to the linear, segmental structure assumed by Chomsky and Halle.

Chomsky and Halle represent speech sounds as bundles of plus-or-minus valued features (e.g. vocalic, high, back, anterior, nasal, etc.)

The phonological component of each lexical entry is considered to be a linear sequence of these feature bundles.