{"id":8732,"date":"2019-05-22T16:10:55","date_gmt":"2019-05-22T16:10:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/phoneme\/"},"modified":"2019-05-22T16:10:55","modified_gmt":"2019-05-22T16:10:55","slug":"phoneme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/phoneme\/","title":{"rendered":"Phoneme"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The smallest unit of meaningful speech sound used to distinguish words and morphemes in a language (e.g., in English, sounds typically made by the letters <span class=\"\" style=\"font-style: italic;\">m<\/span> and <span class=\"\" style=\"font-style: italic;\">n<\/span> are separate phonemes distinguishing words such <span class=\"\" style=\"font-style: italic;\">m<\/span>ail\/<span class=\"\" style=\"font-style: italic;\">n<\/span>ail, or <span class=\"\" style=\"font-style: italic;\">m<\/span>et\/<span class=\"\" style=\"font-style: italic;\">n<\/span>et). &nbsp;Thus,it is a difference in soundthat makes a difference in meaning, with a range of sounds being treated as thesame sound. &nbsp;The word &#8216;cat&#8217; has three morphemes and so does the word &#8216;thought&#8217;. &nbsp;It also signals a meaning change between words (e.g., &#8216;bat&#8217; and &#8216;bag&#8217; differ in their final phoneme). &nbsp;A phoneme is abstract concept or category (you cannot see, touch, or hear a phoneme but you can point to instances) and language specific.&nbsp;There are 44 phonemes in American English.&nbsp;&nbsp;Where English speakers distinguish two phonemes [ <span class=\"\" style=\"font-weight: bold;\">l<\/span>id\/<span class=\"\" style=\"font-weight: bold;\">r<\/span>id ], speakers of other languages may hear only one. For example, R is not distinct from L in Japanese.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>See <a href=\"alphabet\">Alphabet<\/a>, Alphabetic writing system, <a href=\"babbling\">Babbling<\/a>, <a href=\"decoding_ability\">Decoding ability<\/a>, Diagraphs, <a href=\"doublets_-or_geminates-\">Doublets (or geminates)<\/a>, <a href=\"fricative\">Fricative<\/a>, <a href=\"grapheme\">Grapheme<\/a>, <a href=\"grapheme-phoneme_correspondences\">Grapheme-phoneme correspondences<\/a>, International Phonetic Alphabet, <a href=\"irregular_words\">Irregular words<\/a>, <a href=\"morpheme\">Morpheme<\/a>, <a href=\"orthographic_reading_skills\">Orthographic reading skills<\/a>, <a href=\"orthography\">Orthography<\/a>, <a href=\"phoneme\">Phoneme<\/a>, <a href=\"phonemic_mastery\">Phonemic mastery<\/a>, <a href=\"phonics\">Phonics<\/a>, <a href=\"speech_development\">Speech development<\/a>, <a href=\"stimulus-driven_development\">Stimulus-driven development<\/a><\/p>\n<p><\/body><\/html><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The smallest unit of meaningful speech sound used to distinguish words and morphemes in a language (e.g., in English, sounds typically made by the letters m and n are separate phonemes distinguishing words such mail\/nail, or met\/net). &nbsp;Thus,it is a difference in soundthat makes a difference in meaning, with a range of sounds being treated &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/phoneme\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Phoneme&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-8732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-glossary","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}