Surhone Lambert M

Phoneme Surhone Lambert M

Publisher Marketing: Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. In a language or dialect, a phoneme (from the Greek:, ph n ma, "a sound uttered") is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances. Thus a phoneme is a group of slightly different sounds which are all perceived to have the same function by speakers of the language or dialect in question. An example of a phoneme is the /k/ sound in the words kit and skill. (In transcription, phonemes are placed between slashes, as here.) Even though most native speakers don't notice this, in most dialects, the k sounds in each of these words are actually pronounced differently: they are different speech sounds, or phones (which, in transcription, are placed in square brackets). In our example, the /k/ in kit is aspirated, [k ], while the /k/ in skill is not, [k]. The reason why these different sounds are nonetheless considered to belong to the same phoneme in English is that if an English-speaker used one instead of the other, the meaning of the word would not change: saying [k ] in skill might sound odd, but the word would still be recognized.