phontrast: Contrast and Separation Metrics for Phonological Categories

Computes and compares multiple measures of separation and overlap between phonological categories (for example vowels or consonants) in arbitrary multi-dimensional acoustic spaces such as formant values, mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), duration, or learned embeddings. The main entry point, phontrast(), reports several contrast metrics in one call – Jensen-Shannon divergence and distance (Lin, 1991) <doi:10.1109/18.61115>, the Pillai-Bartlett trace, Bhattacharyya distance and affinity, Mahalanobis distance, and proportional overlap – globally or by group on a common separation-oriented scale, with bootstrap confidence intervals. Also provides utilities for preparing estimates for downstream modelling such as generalized additive models and mixed-effects models. Formerly released as 'phonJSD'.

Version: 2.3.1
Depends: R (≥ 4.1.0)
Imports: ks, dplyr, purrr, tibble, rlang, stats, grDevices, utils
Suggests: ggplot2, mgcv, mvtnorm, tuneR, testthat (≥ 3.0.0), knitr, rmarkdown
Published: 2026-08-09
DOI: 10.32614/CRAN.package.phontrast (may not be active yet)
Author: Grant M. Berry [aut, cre]
Maintainer: Grant M. Berry <berry.grant at gmail.com>
BugReports: https://github.com/berrygrant/phontrast/issues
License: MIT + file LICENSE
URL: https://github.com/berrygrant/phontrast
NeedsCompilation: no
Citation: phontrast citation info
Materials: README, NEWS
CRAN checks: phontrast results

Documentation:

Reference manual: phontrast.html , phontrast.pdf
Vignettes: Multidimensional workflows (source, R code)
Quick start: from vowel table to metrics and plots (source, R code)

Downloads:

Package source: phontrast_2.3.1.tar.gz
Windows binaries: r-devel: not available, r-release: not available, r-oldrel: not available
macOS binaries: r-release (arm64): not available, r-oldrel (arm64): not available, r-release (x86_64): not available, r-oldrel (x86_64): not available

Linking:

Please use the canonical form https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=phontrast to link to this page.