Linguistics: Natural Classes of Sounds Practice Test

Phonotactics sets where sounds can appear and how they can combine within a syllable. A natural class is simply a group of sounds that share features. When phonotactics constrains a natural class, it does so by specifying which sequences that class may form and in which positions those sequences may occur—such as onsets, codas, or specific clusters. So, a language might allow members of a given natural class to appear only at the beginning of a syllable, or only in certain consonant clusters, or only in certain contexts before or after other sounds. This is how the same feature-based group of sounds gets distributional limits across the syllable structure, shaping which members of the class can surface where. For example, if a language forbids a whole natural class from appearing in codas, that class is being constrained by phonotactics in a very direct way.