Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The smallest phonetic unit in a language that is capable of conveying a distinction in meaning, as the m of mat and the b of bat in English.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Same as
phone , n. - noun A voice-sound imagined by the insane; a hallucination of voices.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun linguistics An indivisible
unit ofsound in a given language. A phoneme is an abstraction of the physical speech sounds (phones ) and may encompass several different phones.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun (linguistics) one of a small set of speech sounds that are distinguished by the speakers of a particular language
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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By the 2nd millennium BC, Mesopotamian script changed from pictographic to cuneiform writing (wedge shaped signs representing sounds instead of objects), and by around 2000BC the first true alphabetic system (where a phoneme is represented by a letter) appeared.
The History Of Reading « Literacy Articles « Articles « Literacy News 2009
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In addition, the English-Greek children also outperformed their Greek/English counterparts in phoneme awareness tasks, suggesting that learning an alphabetic language as a first one (English) promotes the level of phonological awareness (phonemic awareness).
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A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a given language that can be recognized as being distinct from other sounds in the language.
Homeschool Reading Programs Help Homeschooling Parents Teach Effectively « Articles « Literacy News 2009
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A phoneme is a set of similar sounds showing meaning differences or differentiating between words.
Teaching Efl Pronunciation: Why, What and How? « Articles « Literacy News 2009
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A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a given language that can be recognized as being distinct from other sounds in the language.
How to Teach Reading to Students With Dyslexia « Articles « Literacy News 2009
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I would like to think this meant the pasta was served by bongo-playing beatnik waiters, but I'm afraid the explanation is much more prosaic: most low-level jobs in New York restaurants are filled by Spanish-speakers, and in Spanish b and v are purely graphic variants for the same phoneme, which is pronounced b at the start of a word.
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He read our names from a slate, stumbling over the "W" phoneme, which is strange to the Norlan dialect.
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A phoneme is the smallest sound unit by which we distinguish one word from another.
unknown title 2009
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One of the most famous artists to ground their work in the phoneme is the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, whose "Ur Sonata" demilitarized language after World War I by softening and subtilizing phonemes through the performance of a score. Schwitters 'work coincides with the Russian Futurists', whose made-up language "Zaum" used phonemics to tap language's universal source, and thereby its glossolalic, transliterative potentials.
unknown title 2009
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The other promising audio searching technology is known as phoneme software.
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