Phonology Assistant is a discovery tool. Provided with a corpus of phonetic data, it automatically charts the sounds and through its searching capabilities, helps a user discover and test the rules of sound in a language.
Tone Analysis
Phonology Assistant can sort lexical items by tone melody and look at tone over an phrasal utterance
The participatory approach gets immediately at conscious native speaker distinctive categories, and the phonetics thereof. As a follow-up, PA is a great support for charting and searching.
Does using a Community-based Participatory linguistics approach mean that PA is not needed?
The participatory approach gets immediately at conscious native speaker distinctive categories and the phonetics thereof. You might then conclude that PA is superfluous, but even in this case, PA is a great support for the preparation of a phonological sketch/statement.
Does PA work on Linux or a Mac?
You can run Phonology Assistant using Virtual Machine software: Parallels, VMWare Fusion, or VirtualBox are options.
How does PA compare to using Dekereke?
Both programs can do largely the same things but do it in different ways. Dekereke has the data loaded into the program whereas PA gets its data from FieldWorks, Speech Analyzer, or ToolBox.
