Misplaced Pages

#494505

135-399: While the principles of phonics generally apply regardless of the language or region, the examples in this article are from General American English pronunciation. For more about phonics as it applies to British English , see Synthetic phonics , a method by which the student learns the sounds represented by letters and letter combinations, and blends these sounds to pronounce words. Phonics

270-570: A non-rhotic standard to a rhotic one in the late 1940s, after the triumph of the Second World War , with the patriotic incentive for a more wide-ranging and unpretentious "heartland variety" in television and radio. General American is thus sometimes associated with the speech of North American radio and television announcers, promoted as prestigious in their industry, where it is sometimes called "Broadcast English" "Network English", or "Network Standard". Instructional classes in

405-537: A scattergram based on the formants of vowel sounds, finding the Midland U.S., Western Pennsylvania, Western U.S., and Canada to be closest to the center of the scattergram, and concluding that they had fewer marked dialectical features than other regional accents of North American English, such as New York City or the Southern U.S. Regarded as having General American accents in the earlier 20th century, but not by

540-637: A bank of phonograms, such as -at or -am . Teachers might also teach students about word families (e.g., c an , r an , m an , or m ay , pl ay , s ay ). When students are exposed to different word families, they are able to identify, analyze and construct different rhyming word patterns. An example of a student's increasing ability to construct a rhyming word pattern with the oa grapheme would be as follows: road, toad, load and goad . Examples of other recognizable graphemes that allow students to construct rhyming word patterns are at, igh, ew, oo, ou and air . More letter combinations or graphemes can be viewed in

675-554: A determination, and simply assign the flap in both cases to a single archiphoneme, written (for example) //D// . Further mergers in English are plosives after /s/ , where /p, t, k/ conflate with /b, d, ɡ/ , as suggested by the alternative spellings sketti and sghetti . That is, there is no particular reason to transcribe spin as /ˈspɪn/ rather than as /ˈsbɪn/ , other than its historical development, and it might be less ambiguously transcribed //ˈsBɪn// . A morphophoneme

810-648: A focus on phonics. Their plan includes "revising the elementary Language curriculum and the Grade 9 English course with scientific, evidence-based approaches that emphasize direct, explicit and systematic instruction , and removing references to unscientific discovery and inquiry-based learning, including the three-cueing system, by 2023." Proponents of evidence-based reading instruction maintain that teaching reading without teaching phonics can be harmful to large numbers of students, although in their view not all phonics teaching programs are equally effective. According to them,

945-466: A given language may be highly distorted; this is the case with English, for example. The correspondence between symbols and phonemes in alphabetic writing systems is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence . A phoneme might be represented by a combination of two or more letters ( digraph , trigraph , etc. ), like ⟨sh⟩ in English or ⟨sch⟩ in German (both representing

1080-512: A given language should be analyzed in phonemic terms. Generally, a phoneme is regarded as an abstraction of a set (or equivalence class ) of spoken sound variations that are nevertheless perceived as a single basic unit of sound by the ordinary native speakers of a given language. While phonemes are considered an abstract underlying representation for sound segments within words, the corresponding phonetic realizations of those phonemes—each phoneme with its various allophones—constitute

1215-636: A higher and shorter vowel sound than prize and bride ), raising and gliding of pre-nasal /æ/ (with man having a higher and tenser vowel sound than map ), the weak vowel merger (with affecting and effecting often pronounced the same), and at least one of the LOT vowel mergers (the LOT – PALM merger is complete among most Americans and the LOT – THOUGHT merger among at least half). All of these phenomena are explained in further detail under American English's phonology section . The following provides all

1350-457: A majority of Americans, encompassing a continuum rather than a single unified accent. It is often perceived by Americans themselves as lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics, though Americans with high education, or from the (North) Midland , Western New England , and Western regions of the country are the most likely to be perceived as using General American speech. The precise definition and usefulness of

1485-503: A mental dictionary), making reading and comprehension easier. The process, called orthographic mapping , involves decoding, crosschecking, mental marking and rereading . It takes significantly less time than memorization. This process works for fully-alphabetic readers when reading simple decodable words from left to right through the word. Irregular words pose more of a challenge, yet research in 2018 concluded that "fully-alphabetic students" learn irregular words more easily when they use

SECTION 10

#1732757527495

1620-406: A near minimal pair. The reason why this is still acceptable proof of phonemehood is that there is nothing about the additional difference (/r/ vs. /l/) that can be expected to somehow condition a voicing difference for a single underlying postalveolar fricative. One can, however, find true minimal pairs for /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ if less common words are considered. For example, ' Confucian ' and 'confusion' are

1755-629: A part of the phonics method. They are usually associated with whole language and balanced literacy where students are expected to memorize common words such as those on the Dolch word list and the Fry word list (e.g., a, be, call, do, eat, fall, gave, etc.). The supposition (in whole language) is that students will learn to read more easily if they memorize the most common words they will encounter, especially words that are not easily decoded (i.e. exceptions). However, according to research, whole-word memorisation

1890-483: A phoneme has more than one allophone , the one actually heard at a given occurrence of that phoneme may be dependent on the phonetic environment (surrounding sounds). Allophones that normally cannot appear in the same environment are said to be in complementary distribution . In other cases, the choice of allophone may be dependent on the individual speaker or other unpredictable factors. Such allophones are said to be in free variation , but allophones are still selected in

2025-523: A process called hierarchical decoding . In this process, students, rather than decode from left to right, are taught to focus attention on the irregular elements such as a vowel-digraph and a silent-e; for example, break (b - r - ea - k), height (h - eigh - t), touch (t - ou - ch ), and make (m - a - k e ) . Consequentially, they suggest that teachers and tutors should focus on "teaching decoding with more advanced vowel patterns before expecting young readers to tackle irregular words". Systematic phonics

2160-408: A selection of the alternative spellings of the 40+ sounds of the English language based on General American English pronunciation, recognizing there are many regional variations. Teachers of synthetic phonics emphasize the letter sounds not the letter names (i.e. mmm not em, sss not ess, fff not ef ). It is usually recommended that teachers of English-reading introduce the "most frequent sounds" and

2295-417: A set of phonemes, and these different systems or solutions are not simply correct or incorrect, but may be regarded only as being good or bad for various purposes". The linguist F. W. Householder referred to this argument within linguistics as "God's Truth" (i.e. the stance that a given language has an intrinsic structure to be discovered) vs. "hocus-pocus" (i.e. the stance that any proposed, coherent structure

2430-456: A simple /k/ , colloquial Samoan lacks /t/ and /n/ , while Rotokas and Quileute lack /m/ and /n/ . During the development of phoneme theory in the mid-20th century, phonologists were concerned not only with the procedures and principles involved in producing a phonemic analysis of the sounds of a given language, but also with the reality or uniqueness of the phonemic solution. These were central concerns of phonology . Some writers took

2565-435: A single morphophoneme, which might be transcribed (for example) //z// or |z| , and which is realized phonemically as /s/ after most voiceless consonants (as in cat s ) and as /z/ in other cases (as in dog s ). All known languages use only a small subset of the many possible sounds that the human speech organs can produce, and, because of allophony , the number of distinct phonemes will generally be smaller than

2700-665: A single phoneme in some other languages, such as Spanish, in which [pan] and [paŋ] for instance are merely interpreted by Spanish speakers as regional or dialect-specific ways of pronouncing the same word ( pan : the Spanish word for "bread"). Such spoken variations of a single phoneme are known by linguists as allophones . Linguists use slashes in the IPA to transcribe phonemes but square brackets to transcribe more precise pronunciation details, including allophones; they describe this basic distinction as phonemic versus phonetic . Thus,

2835-466: A single phoneme: the one traditionally represented in the IPA as /t/ . For computer-typing purposes, systems such as X-SAMPA exist to represent IPA symbols using only ASCII characters. However, descriptions of particular languages may use different conventional symbols to represent the phonemes of those languages. For languages whose writing systems employ the phonemic principle , ordinary letters may be used to denote phonemes, although this approach

SECTION 20

#1732757527495

2970-546: A specific phonetic context, not the other way around. The term phonème (from Ancient Greek : φώνημα , romanized :  phōnēma , "sound made, utterance, thing spoken, speech, language" ) was reportedly first used by A. Dufriche-Desgenettes in 1873, but it referred only to a speech sound. The term phoneme as an abstraction was developed by the Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and his student Mikołaj Kruszewski during 1875–1895. The term used by these two

3105-467: A spoken word, sh - r - ou - d - s = shrouds (IPA / ʃ r aʊ d z / ). The goal of either a blended phonics or synthetic phonics instructional program is that students identify the sound-symbol correspondences and blend their phonemes automatically. Since 2005, synthetic phonics has become the accepted method of teaching reading (by phonics instruction) in the United Kingdom and Australia. In

3240-472: A unique phoneme in such cases, since to do so would mean providing redundant or even arbitrary information – instead they use the technique of underspecification . An archiphoneme is an object sometimes used to represent an underspecified phoneme. An example of neutralization is provided by the Russian vowels /a/ and /o/ . These phonemes are contrasting in stressed syllables, but in unstressed syllables

3375-452: A valid minimal pair. Besides segmental phonemes such as vowels and consonants, there are also suprasegmental features of pronunciation (such as tone and stress , syllable boundaries and other forms of juncture , nasalization and vowel harmony ), which, in many languages, change the meaning of words and so are phonemic. Phonemic stress is encountered in languages such as English. For example, there are two words spelled invite , one

3510-421: A writing system that can be used to represent phonemes. Since /l/ and /t/ alone distinguish certain words from others, they are each examples of phonemes of the English language. Specifically they are consonant phonemes, along with /s/ , while /ɛ/ is a vowel phoneme. The spelling of English does not strictly conform to its phonemes, so that the words knot , nut , and gnat , regardless of spelling, all share

3645-502: Is "labor-intensive", requiring on average about 35 trials per word. On the other hand, phonics advocates say that most words are decodable, so comparatively few words have to be memorized. And because a child will over time encounter many low-frequency words, "the phonological recoding mechanism is a very powerful, indeed essential, mechanism throughout reading development". Furthermore, researchers suggest that teachers who withhold phonics instruction to make it easier on children "are having

3780-440: Is a method employed to teach students to read by sounding out the letters then blending the sounds to form the word. This method involves learning how letters or letter groups represent individual sounds, and that those sounds are blended to form a word. For example, shrouds would be read by pronouncing the sounds for each spelling, sh,r,ou,d,s (IPA / ʃ , r , aʊ , d , z / ), then blending those sounds orally to produce

3915-442: Is a particular type of analytic phonics in which the teacher has students analyze phonic elements according to the speech sounds ( phonograms ) in the word. One method is referred to as the onset- rime ) approach. The onset is the initial sound and the rime is the vowel and the consonant sounds that follow it. For example, in the words cat, mat and sat, the rime is at .) Teachers using the analogy method may have students memorize

4050-418: Is a purely articulatory system apart from the use of the acoustic term 'sibilant'. In the description of some languages, the term chroneme has been used to indicate contrastive length or duration of phonemes. In languages in which tones are phonemic, the tone phonemes may be called tonemes . Though not all scholars working on such languages use these terms, they are by no means obsolete. By analogy with

4185-414: Is a theoretical unit at a deeper level of abstraction than traditional phonemes, and is taken to be a unit from which morphemes are built up. A morphophoneme within a morpheme can be expressed in different ways in different allomorphs of that morpheme (according to morphophonological rules). For example, the English plural morpheme -s appearing in words such as cats and dogs can be considered to be

Phonics - Misplaced Pages Continue

4320-439: Is a verb and is stressed on the second syllable, the other is a noun and stressed on the first syllable (without changing any of the individual sounds). The position of the stress distinguishes the words and so a full phonemic specification would include indication of the position of the stress: /ɪnˈvaɪt/ for the verb, /ˈɪnvaɪt/ for the noun. In other languages, such as French , word stress cannot have this function (its position

4455-667: Is as good as any other). Different analyses of the English vowel system may be used to illustrate this. The article English phonology states that "English has a particularly large number of vowel phonemes" and that "there are 20 vowel phonemes in Received Pronunciation, 14–16 in General American and 20–21 in Australian English". Although these figures are often quoted as fact, they actually reflect just one of many possible analyses, and later in

4590-411: Is called a minimal pair for the two alternative phones in question (in this case, [kʰ] and [k] ). The existence of minimal pairs is a common test to decide whether two phones represent different phonemes or are allophones of the same phoneme. To take another example, the minimal pair t ip and d ip illustrates that in English, [t] and [d] belong to separate phonemes, /t/ and /d/ ; since

4725-412: Is false. Teachers can use engaging games or materials to teach letter-sound connections, and it can also be incorporated with the reading of meaningful text. Phonics can be taught systematically in a variety of ways, such as: synthetic phonics, analytic phonics and analogy phonics. However, their effectiveness vary considerably because the methods differ in such areas as the range of letter-sound coverage,

4860-505: Is generally predictable) and so it is not phonemic (and therefore not usually indicated in dictionaries). Phonemic tones are found in languages such as Mandarin Chinese in which a given syllable can have five different tonal pronunciations: The tone "phonemes" in such languages are sometimes called tonemes . Languages such as English do not have phonemic tone, but they use intonation for functions such as emphasis and attitude. When

4995-650: Is nearly a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and the letter patterns that represent them. English spelling is more complex, a deep orthography , partly because it attempts to represent the 40+ phonemes of the spoken language with an alphabet composed of only 26 letters (and no accent marks or diacritics ). As a result, two letters are often used together to represent distinct sounds, referred to as digraphs . For example, t and h placed side by side to represent either / θ / as in math or / ð / as in father . English has absorbed many words from other languages throughout its history, usually without changing

5130-486: Is not one specific method of teaching phonics; it is a term used to describe phonics approaches that are taught explicitly and in a structured, systematic manner. They are systematic because the letters and the sounds they relate to are taught in a specific sequence, as opposed to incidentally or on a "when needed" basis. Systematic phonics is sometimes mischaracterized as "skill and drill" with little attention to meaning. However, researchers point out that this impression

5265-430: Is notoriously a fire in a wooden stove." This approach was opposed to that of Edward Sapir , who gave an important role to native speakers' intuitions about where a particular sound or group of sounds fitted into a pattern. Using English [ŋ] as an example, Sapir argued that, despite the superficial appearance that this sound belongs to a group of three nasal consonant phonemes (/m/, /n/ and /ŋ/), native speakers feel that

5400-663: Is often featured in discussions about science of reading , and evidence-based practices . The National Reading Panel (U.S. 2000) suggests that phonics be taught together with phonemic awareness, oral fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Timothy Shanahan , a member of that panel, suggests that primary students receive 60–90 minutes per day of explicit, systematic, literacy instruction time; and that it be divided equally between a) words and word parts (e.g., letters, sounds, decoding and phonemic awareness), b) oral reading fluency, c) reading comprehension, and d) writing. Furthermore, he states that "the phonemic awareness skills found to give

5535-408: Is often imperfect, as pronunciations naturally shift in a language over time, rendering previous spelling systems outdated or no longer closely representative of the sounds of the language (see § Correspondence between letters and phonemes below). A phoneme is a sound or a group of different sounds perceived to have the same function by speakers of the language or dialect in question. An example

Phonics - Misplaced Pages Continue

5670-492: Is possible to discover the phonemes of a language purely by examining the distribution of phonetic segments. Referring to mentalistic definitions of the phoneme, Twaddell (1935) stated "Such a definition is invalid because (1) we have no right to guess about the linguistic workings of an inaccessible 'mind', and (2) we can secure no advantage from such guesses. The linguistic processes of the 'mind' as such are quite simply unobservable; and introspection about linguistic processes

5805-574: Is taught using a variety of approaches, for example: Reading by using phonics is often referred to as decoding words , sounding-out words or using print-to-sound relationships . Since phonics focuses on the sounds and letters within words (i.e. sublexical ), it is often contrasted with whole language (a word-level-up philosophy for teaching reading) and a compromise approach called balanced literacy (the attempt to combine whole language and phonics). Some phonics critics suggest that learning phonics prevents children from reading "real books". However,

5940-662: Is that part of phonological awareness that is concerned with phonemes. English spelling is based on the alphabetic principle . In the education field it is also referred to as the alphabetic code . In an alphabetic writing system, letters are used to represent speech sounds, or phonemes . For example, the word cat is spelled with three letters, c , a , and t , each representing a phoneme, respectively, / k / , / æ / , and / t / . The spelling structures for some alphabetic languages , such as Spanish , Russian and German , are comparatively orthographically transparent, or orthographically shallow , because there

6075-412: Is that the sound spelled with the symbol t is usually articulated with a glottal stop [ʔ] (or a similar glottalized sound) in the word cat , an alveolar flap [ɾ] in dating , an alveolar plosive [t] in stick , and an aspirated alveolar plosive [tʰ] in tie ; however, American speakers perceive or "hear" all of these sounds (usually with no conscious effort) as merely being allophones of

6210-502: Is the English phoneme /k/ , which occurs in words such as c at , k it , s c at , s k it . Although most native speakers do not notice this, in most English dialects, the "c/k" sounds in these words are not identical: in kit [kʰɪt] , the sound is aspirated, but in skill [skɪl] , it is unaspirated. The words, therefore, contain different speech sounds , or phones , transcribed [kʰ] for

6345-417: Is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the individual spoken sounds of language, independent of writing. Phonemic awareness is part of oral language ability and is critical for learning to read. To assess phonemic awareness, or teach it explicitly, learners are given a variety of exercises, such as adding a sound (e.g., Add the th sound to the beginning of the word ink ), changing a sound (e.g., In

6480-650: The American West , and the American Midland . The following charts present the vowels that converge across these three dialect regions to form an unmarked or generic American English sound system. Phoneme A phoneme ( / ˈ f oʊ n iː m / ) is any set of similar speech sounds that is perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages contains phonemes (or

6615-718: The Department for Education in England says children should practise phonics by reading books consistent with their developing phonic knowledge and skill; and, at the same time they should hear, share and discuss "a wide range of high-quality books to develop a love of reading and broaden their vocabulary". In addition, researchers say that "the phonological pathway is an essential component of skilled reading" and "for most children it requires instruction, hence phonics". Some recommend 20–30 minutes of daily phonics instruction in grades K–2, about 200 hours. The National Reading Panel in

6750-539: The English dialects of England or German dialects of Germany ). One factor fueling General American's popularity was the major demographic change of twentieth-century American society: increased suburbanization , leading to less mingling of different social classes and less density and diversity of linguistic interactions. As a result, wealthier and higher-educated Americans' communications became more restricted to their own demographic. This, alongside their new marketplace that transcended regional boundaries (arising from

6885-774: The Kam–Sui languages have six to nine tones (depending on how they are counted), and the Kam-Sui Dong language has nine to 15 tones by the same measure. One of the Kru languages , Wobé , has been claimed to have 14, though this is disputed. The most common vowel system consists of the five vowels /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/ . The most common consonants are /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/ . Relatively few languages lack any of these consonants, although it does happen: for example, Arabic lacks /p/ , standard Hawaiian lacks /t/ , Mohawk and Tlingit lack /p/ and /m/ , Hupa lacks both /p/ and

SECTION 50

#1732757527495

7020-524: The Prague school . Archiphonemes are often notated with a capital letter within double virgules or pipes, as with the examples //A// and //N// given above. Other ways the second of these has been notated include |m-n-ŋ| , {m, n, ŋ} and //n*// . Another example from English, but this time involving complete phonetic convergence as in the Russian example, is the flapping of /t/ and /d/ in some American English (described above under Biuniqueness ). Here

7155-538: The "common spellings" first and save the more infrequent sounds and complex spellings for later. (e.g., the sounds /s/ and /t/ before /v/ and /w/; and the spellings c a ke before eigh t and c at before du ck ). For a more complete list of alternative spellings of the sounds, see English orthography#Sound-to-spelling correspondences . Complex consonants and digraphs: Clearly, "k+s", "k+w" and "g+z" each have two sounds that are blended together. However, they are often taught in this fashion to make it easier for

7290-474: The ABC method, by which they recited the letters used in each word, from a familiar piece of text such as Genesis. It was John Hart who first suggested that the focus should be on the relationship between what is now referred to as graphemes and phonemes . For more information see Practices by country or region (below); and History of learning to read . Not to be confused with phonics, phonemic awareness (PA)

7425-874: The ASL signs for father and mother differ minimally with respect to location while handshape and movement are identical; location is thus contrastive. Stokoe's terminology and notation system are no longer used by researchers to describe the phonemes of sign languages; William Stokoe 's research, while still considered seminal, has been found not to characterize American Sign Language or other sign languages sufficiently. For instance, non-manual features are not included in Stokoe's classification. More sophisticated models of sign language phonology have since been proposed by Brentari , Sandler , and Van der Kooij. Cherology and chereme (from Ancient Greek : χείρ "hand") are synonyms of phonology and phoneme previously used in

7560-604: The English Phonology article an alternative analysis is suggested in which some diphthongs and long vowels may be interpreted as comprising a short vowel linked to either / j / or / w / . The fullest exposition of this approach is found in Trager and Smith (1951), where all long vowels and diphthongs ("complex nuclei") are made up of a short vowel combined with either /j/ , /w/ or /h/ (plus /r/ for rhotic accents), each comprising two phonemes. The transcription for

7695-404: The General American consonant and vowel sounds. A table containing the consonant phonemes is given below: The 2006 Atlas of North American English surmises that "if one were to recognize a type of North American English to be called 'General American'" according to data measurements of vowel pronunciations, "it would be the configuration formed by these three" dialect regions: Canada ,

7830-699: The General American umbrella are the regional accents of the West , Western New England , and the North Midland (a band spanning central Ohio, central Indiana, central Illinois, northern Missouri, southern Iowa, and southeastern Nebraska), plus the accents of highly educated Americans nationwide. Arguably, all Canadian English accents west of Quebec are also General American, though Canadian vowel raising and certain other features may serve to distinguish such accents from U.S. ones. William Labov et al.'s 2006 Atlas of North American English put together

7965-598: The South and with Southern and Eastern European immigrant groups (for example, Jewish communities) in the coastal Northeast. Instead, socially-conscious Americans settled upon accents more prestigiously associated with White Anglo-Saxon Protestant communities in the remainder of the country: namely, the West, the Midwest, and the non-coastal Northeast. Kenyon, author of American Pronunciation (1924) and pronunciation editor for

8100-480: The South" and referring especially to speech associated with the vaguely-defined " Midwest ", despite any historical or present evidence supporting this notion. Kretzschmar argues that a General American accent is simply the result of American speakers suppressing regional and social features that have become widely noticed and stigmatized. Since calling one variety of American speech the "general" variety can imply privileging and prejudice , Kretzchmar instead promotes

8235-638: The UK is known as synthetic phonics . Beginning as early as 2014, several States in the United States have changed their curriculum to include systematic phonics instruction in elementary school. In 2018, the State Government of Victoria , Australia, published a website containing a comprehensive Literacy Teaching Toolkit including Effective Reading Instruction, Phonics, and Sample Phonics Lessons. Synthetic phonics , also known as blended phonics,

SECTION 60

#1732757527495

8370-414: The United States concluded that systematic phonics instruction is more effective than unsystematic phonics or non-phonics instruction. Some critics suggest that systematic phonics is "skill and drill" with little attention to meaning. However, researchers point out that this impression is false. Teachers can use engaging games or materials to teach letter-sound connections, and it can also be incorporated with

8505-799: The United States that promise " accent reduction ", "accent modification", or "accent neutralization" usually attempt to teach General American patterns. Television journalist Linda Ellerbee states that "in television you are not supposed to sound like you're from anywhere", and political comedian Stephen Colbert says he consciously avoided developing a Southern American accent in response to media portrayals of Southerners as stupid and uneducated. Typical General American accent features (for example, in contrast to British English) include features that concern consonants, such as rhoticity (full pronunciation of all /r/ sounds), pre-nasal T-glottalization (with satin pronounced [ˈsæʔn̩] , not [ˈsætn̩] ), T- and D-flapping (with metal and medal pronounced

8640-654: The United States, a pilot program using the Core Knowledge Early Literacy program that used this type of phonics approach showed significantly higher results in K–3 reading compared with comparison schools. In addition, several States such as California, Ohio, New York and Arkansas, are promoting the principles of synthetic phonics (see synthetic phonics in the US ). Analytic phonics does not involve pronouncing individual sounds (phonemes) in isolation and blending

8775-474: The accent continuum, have also been suggested by sociolinguist Charles Boberg . Since the 2000s, Mainstream American English has also been occasionally used, particularly in scholarly articles that contrast it with African-American English . Modern language scholars discredit the original notion of General American as a single unified accent, or a standardized form of English —except perhaps as used by television networks and other mass media . Today,

8910-462: The approach of underspecification would not attempt to assign [ə] to a specific phoneme in some or all of these cases, although it might be assigned to an archiphoneme, written something like //A// , which reflects the two neutralized phonemes in this position, or {a|o} , reflecting its unmerged values. A somewhat different example is found in English, with the three nasal phonemes /m, n, ŋ/ . In word-final position these all contrast, as shown by

9045-477: The appropriate environments) to be realized with the phone [ɾ] (an alveolar flap ). For example, the same flap sound may be heard in the words hi tt ing and bi dd ing , although it is intended to realize the phoneme /t/ in the first word and /d/ in the second. This appears to contradict biuniqueness. For further discussion of such cases, see the next section. Phonemes that are contrastive in certain environments may not be contrastive in all environments. In

9180-436: The aspirated form and [k] for the unaspirated one. These different sounds are nonetheless considered to belong to the same phoneme, because if a speaker used one instead of the other, the meaning of the word would not change: using the aspirated form [kʰ] in skill might sound odd, but the word would still be recognized. By contrast, some other sounds would cause a change in meaning if substituted: for example, substitution of

9315-508: The average basic reading score dropped by 3% in 2022. Between 2013 and 2027, 37 US States have passed laws or implemented new policies related to evidence-based reading instruction. As a result, many schools are moving away from balance literacy programs that encourage students to guess a word, and are introducing phonics where they learn to "decode" (sound out) words. The Canadian provinces of Ontario and Nova Scotia , respectively, reported that 26% and 30% of grade three students did not meet

9450-493: The century's faster transportation methods), reinforced a widespread belief that highly educated Americans should not possess a regional accent. A General American sound, then, originated from both suburbanization and suppression of regional accent by highly educated Americans in formal settings. A second factor was a rise in immigration to the Great Lakes area (one native region of supposed "General American" speech) following

9585-537: The consonant phonemes /n/ and /t/ , differing only by their internal vowel phonemes: /ɒ/ , /ʌ/ , and /æ/ , respectively. Similarly, /pʊʃt/ is the notation for a sequence of four phonemes, /p/ , /ʊ/ , /ʃ/ , and /t/ , that together constitute the word pushed . Sounds that are perceived as phonemes vary by languages and dialects, so that [ n ] and [ ŋ ] are separate phonemes in English since they distinguish words like sin from sing ( /sɪn/ versus /sɪŋ/ ), yet they comprise

9720-459: The contrast is lost, since both are reduced to the same sound, usually [ə] (for details, see vowel reduction in Russian ). In order to assign such an instance of [ə] to one of the phonemes /a/ and /o/ , it is necessary to consider morphological factors (such as which of the vowels occurs in other forms of the words, or which inflectional pattern is followed). In some cases even this may not provide an unambiguous answer. A description using

9855-428: The devisers of the alphabet chose not to represent the phonemic effect of vowel length. However, because changes in the spoken language are often not accompanied by changes in the established orthography (as well as other reasons, including dialect differences, the effects of morphophonology on orthography, and the use of foreign spellings for some loanwords ), the correspondence between spelling and pronunciation in

9990-526: The early to mid-20th century, deviance away from General American sounds started occurring, and may be ongoing, in the eastern Great Lakes region due to its Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS) towards a unique Inland Northern accent (often now associated with the region's urban centers, like Chicago and Detroit) and in the western Great Lakes region towards a unique North Central accent (often associated with Minnesota , Wisconsin , and North Dakota ). Linguists have proposed multiple factors contributing to

10125-438: The effectiveness of a program depends on using specific curriculum and instruction techniques, classroom management, grouping, and other factors. Phonics instruction is also an important part of the science of reading . Interest in evidence-based education appears to be growing. In 2019, Best Evidence Encyclopedia (BEE) released a review of research on 48 different programs for struggling readers in elementary schools. Many of

10260-544: The environments where they do not contrast, the contrast is said to be neutralized . In these positions it may become less clear which phoneme a given phone represents. Absolute neutralization is a phenomenon in which a segment of the underlying representation is not realized in any of its phonetic representations (surface forms). The term was introduced by Paul Kiparsky (1968), and contrasts with contextual neutralization where some phonemes are not contrastive in certain environments. Some phonologists prefer not to specify

10395-562: The first or second year of school. Yet, in the USA 20% or more do not meet grade expectations. According to the 2019 Nation's Report card , 34% of grade four students in the United States failed to perform at or above the Basic reading level . There was a significant difference by race and ethnicity (e.g., black students at 52% and white students at 23%). After the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic ,

10530-434: The following: Some phonotactic restrictions can alternatively be analyzed as cases of neutralization. See Neutralization and archiphonemes below, particularly the example of the occurrence of the three English nasals before stops. Biuniqueness is a requirement of classic structuralist phonemics. It means that a given phone , wherever it occurs, must unambiguously be assigned to one and only one phoneme. In other words,

10665-579: The greatest reading advantage to kindergarten and first-grade children are segmenting and blending ". The Ontario Association of Deans of Education (Canada) published research Monograph # 37 entitled Supporting early language and literacy with suggestions for parents and teachers in helping children prior to grade one. It covers the areas of letter names and letter-sound correspondence (phonics), as well as conversation, play-based learning, print, phonological awareness, shared reading, and vocabulary. Sight words (i.e. high-frequency or common words) are not

10800-516: The idea of a cognitive or psycholinguistic function for the phoneme. Later, it was used and redefined in generative linguistics , most famously by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle , and remains central to many accounts of the development of modern phonology . As a theoretical concept or model, though, it has been supplemented and even replaced by others. Some linguists (such as Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle ) proposed that phonemes may be further decomposable into features , such features being

10935-400: The language perceive two sounds as significantly different even if no exact minimal pair exists in the lexicon. It is challenging to find a minimal pair to distinguish English / ʃ / from / ʒ / , yet it seems uncontroversial to claim that the two consonants are distinct phonemes. The two words 'pressure' / ˈ p r ɛ ʃ ər / and 'pleasure' / ˈ p l ɛ ʒ ər / can serve as

11070-534: The learner to understand the sounds of "x" and "qu". The following is an explanation of many of the phonics patterns. These patterns are just a few examples out of dozens that can be used to help learners unpack the challenging English alphabetic code. While complex, many believe English spelling does retain order and reason. Researchers such as Joseph Torgesen estimate that "between four and six percent" of children would still have weak word reading skills even if they were exposed to effective interventions in

11205-525: The letters ee almost always represent / iː / (e.g., meet ), but the sound can also be represented by the letters e , i and y and digraphs ie , ei , or ea (e.g., sh e , sard i ne, sunn y , ch ie f, s ei ze, ea t). Similarly, the letter cluster ough represents / ʌ f / as in en ough , / oʊ / as in th ough , / uː / as in thr ough , / ɒ f / as in c ough , / aʊ / as in b ough , / ɔː / as in b ough t, and / ʌ p / as in hicc ough , while in sl ough and l ough ,

11340-542: The mapping between phones and phonemes is required to be many-to-one rather than many-to-many . The notion of biuniqueness was controversial among some pre- generative linguists and was prominently challenged by Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky in the late 1950s and early 1960s. An example of the problems arising from the biuniqueness requirement is provided by the phenomenon of flapping in North American English . This may cause either /t/ or /d/ (in

11475-462: The meaning of a word. In those languages, therefore, the two sounds represent different phonemes. For example, in Icelandic , [kʰ] is the first sound of kátur , meaning "cheerful", but [k] is the first sound of gátur , meaning "riddles". Icelandic, therefore, has two separate phonemes /kʰ/ and /k/ . A pair of words like kátur and gátur (above) that differ only in one phone

11610-701: The middle of the 20th century, are the Mid-Atlantic United States , the Inland Northern United States , and Western Pennsylvania . However, many younger speakers within the Inland North seem to be moving back away from the Northern Cities Shift of front lax vowels that were rising. Accents that have never been labeled "General American", even since the term's popularization in the 1930s, are

11745-489: The minimal triplet sum /sʌm/ , sun /sʌn/ , sung /sʌŋ/ . However, before a stop such as /p, t, k/ (provided there is no morpheme boundary between them), only one of the nasals is possible in any given position: /m/ before /p/ , /n/ before /t/ or /d/ , and /ŋ/ before /k/ , as in limp, lint, link ( /lɪmp/ , /lɪnt/ , /lɪŋk/ ). The nasals are therefore not contrastive in these environments, and according to some theorists this makes it inappropriate to assign

11880-863: The most at-risk students , have the greatest potential for the largest numbers of struggling readers. Robert Slavin , of BEE, goes so far as to suggest that states should "hire thousands of tutors" to support students scoring far below grade level – particularly in elementary school reading. Research, he says, shows "only tutoring, both one-to-one and one-to-small group, in reading and mathematics, had an effect size larger than +0.10 ... averages are around +0.30", and "well-trained teaching assistants using structured tutoring materials or software can obtain outcomes as good as those obtained by certified teachers as tutors". Other evidence-based comparison databases featuring phonics and other methods include Evidence for ESSA (Center for Research and Reform in Education) (meeting

12015-415: The nasal phones heard here to any one of the phonemes (even though, in this case, the phonetic evidence is unambiguous). Instead they may analyze these phonemes as belonging to a single archiphoneme, written something like //N// , and state the underlying representations of limp, lint, link to be //lɪNp//, //lɪNt//, //lɪNk// . This latter type of analysis is often associated with Nikolai Trubetzkoy of

12150-427: The non-coastal Northeastern United States in the very early 20th century, which was relatively stable since that region's original settlement by English speakers in the mid-19th century. This includes western New England and the area to its immediate west, settled by members of the same dialect community: interior Pennsylvania , Upstate New York , and the adjacent " Midwest " or Great Lakes region . However, since

12285-649: The number of identifiably different sounds. Different languages vary considerably in the number of phonemes they have in their systems (although apparent variation may sometimes result from the different approaches taken by the linguists doing the analysis). The total phonemic inventory in languages varies from as few as 9–11 in Pirahã and 11 in Rotokas to as many as 141 in ǃXũ . The number of phonemically distinct vowels can be as low as two, as in Ubykh and Arrernte . At

12420-549: The opposite effect" by making it harder for children to gain basic word-recognition skills. They suggest that learners should focus on understanding the principles of phonics so they can recognize the phonemic overlaps among words (e.g., have, had, has, having, haven't, etc.), making it easier to decode them all. Sight vocabulary is a part of the phonics method. It describes words that are stored in long-term memory and read automatically. Skilled fully-alphabetic readers learn to store words in long-term memory without memorization (i.e.

12555-564: The other extreme, the Bantu language Ngwe has 14 vowel qualities, 12 of which may occur long or short, making 26 oral vowels, plus six nasalized vowels, long and short, making a total of 38 vowels; while !Xóõ achieves 31 pure vowels, not counting its additional variation by vowel length, by varying the phonation . As regards consonant phonemes, Puinave and the Papuan language Tauade each have just seven, and Rotokas has only six. !Xóõ , on

12690-461: The other hand, has somewhere around 77, and Ubykh 81. The English language uses a rather large set of 13 to 21 vowel phonemes, including diphthongs, although its 22 to 26 consonants are close to average. Across all languages, the average number of consonant phonemes per language is about 22, while the average number of vowel phonemes is about 8. Some languages, such as French , have no phonemic tone or stress , while Cantonese and several of

12825-454: The phoneme /ʃ/ ). Also a single letter may represent two phonemes, as in English ⟨x⟩ representing /gz/ or /ks/ . There may also exist spelling/pronunciation rules (such as those for the pronunciation of ⟨c⟩ in Italian ) that further complicate the correspondence of letters to phonemes, although they need not affect the ability to predict the pronunciation from

12960-785: The phoneme, linguists have proposed other sorts of underlying objects, giving them names with the suffix -eme , such as morpheme and grapheme . These are sometimes called emic units . The latter term was first used by Kenneth Pike , who also generalized the concepts of emic and etic description (from phonemic and phonetic respectively) to applications outside linguistics. Languages do not generally allow words or syllables to be built of any arbitrary sequences of phonemes. There are phonotactic restrictions on which sequences of phonemes are possible and in which environments certain phonemes can occur. Phonemes that are significantly limited by such restrictions may be called restricted phonemes . In English, examples of such restrictions include

13095-476: The popularity of a rhotic "General American" class of accents throughout the United States. Most factors focus on the first half of the twentieth century, though a basic General American pronunciation system may have existed even before the twentieth century, since most American English dialects have diverged very little from each other anyway, when compared to dialects of single languages in other countries where there has been more time for language change (such as

13230-418: The position expressed by Kenneth Pike : "There is only one accurate phonemic analysis for a given set of data", while others believed that different analyses, equally valid, could be made for the same data. Yuen Ren Chao (1934), in his article "The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems" stated "given the sounds of a language, there are usually more than one possible way of reducing them to

13365-1068: The programs used phonics-based teaching and/or one or more of the following: cooperative learning , technology-supported adaptive instruction (see Educational technology ), metacognitive skills, phonemic awareness , word reading, fluency , vocabulary , multisensory learning , spelling , guided reading , reading comprehension , word analysis, structured curriculum , and balanced literacy (non-phonetic approach). The BEE review concludes that a) outcomes were positive for one-to-one tutoring, b) outcomes were positive but not as large for one-to-small group tutoring, c) there were no differences in outcomes between teachers and teaching assistants as tutors, d) technology-supported adaptive instruction did not have positive outcomes, e) whole-class approaches (mostly cooperative learning) and whole-school approaches incorporating tutoring obtained outcomes for struggling readers as large as those found for one-to-one tutoring, and benefitted many more students, and f) approaches mixing classroom and school improvements, with tutoring for

13500-498: The pronunciation patterns of tap versus tab , or pat versus bat , can be represented phonemically and are written between slashes (including /p/ , /b/ , etc.), while nuances of exactly how a speaker pronounces /p/ are phonetic and written between brackets, like [p] for the p in spit versus [pʰ] for the p in pit , which in English is an aspirated allophone of /p/ (i.e., pronounced with an extra burst of air). There are many views as to exactly what phonemes are and how

13635-456: The pronunciation varies. Although the patterns are inconsistent, when English spelling rules take into account syllable structure, phonetics, etymology, and accents, there are dozens of rules that are 75% or more reliable. This level of reliability can only be achieved by extending the rules far outside the domain of phonics, which deals with letter-sound correspondences, and into the morphophonemic and morphological domains. The following are

13770-467: The provincial reading standards in 2019. In Ontario, 53% of Grade 3 students with special education needs (students who have an Individual Education Plan), were not meeting the provincial standard. In 2022, the Minister of Education for Ontario said they are taking immediate action to improve student literacy and making longer-term reforms to modernize the way reading is taught and assessed in schools, with

13905-517: The reading of meaningful text. The term phonics during the 19th century and into the 1970s was used as a synonym of phonetics . The use of the term in reference to the method of teaching is dated to 1901 by the Oxford English Dictionary . The relationship between sounds and letters is the backbone of traditional phonics. This principle was first presented by John Hart in 1570. Prior to that children learned to read through

14040-588: The region's rapid industrialization period after the American Civil War , when this region's speakers went on to form a successful and highly mobile business elite, who traveled around the country in the mid-twentieth century, spreading the high status of their accents. A third factor is that various sociological (often race- and class-based) forces repelled socially-conscious Americans away from accents negatively associated with certain minority groups, such as African Americans and poor white communities in

14175-652: The regional accents (especially the r -dropping ones) of Eastern New England , New York City , and the American South . In 1982, British phonetician John C. Wells wrote that two-thirds of the American population spoke with a General American accent. English-language scholar William A. Kretzschmar Jr. explains in a 2004 article that the term "General American" came to refer to "a presumed most common or 'default' form of American English, especially to be distinguished from marked regional speech of New England or

14310-425: The same period there was disagreement about the correct basis for a phonemic analysis. The structuralist position was that the analysis should be made purely on the basis of the sound elements and their distribution, with no reference to extraneous factors such as grammar, morphology or the intuitions of the native speaker; this position is strongly associated with Leonard Bloomfield . Zellig Harris claimed that it

14445-501: The same phoneme. However, they are so dissimilar phonetically that they are considered separate phonemes. A case like this shows that sometimes it is the systemic distinctions and not the lexical context which are decisive in establishing phonemes. This implies that the phoneme should be defined as the smallest phonological unit which is contrastive at a lexical level or distinctive at a systemic level. Phonologists have sometimes had recourse to "near minimal pairs" to show that speakers of

14580-439: The same, as [ˈmɛɾɫ̩] ), velarization of L in all contexts (with filling pronounced [ˈfɪɫɪŋ] , not [ˈfɪlɪŋ] ), yod-dropping after alveolar consonants (with new pronounced /nu/ , not /nju/ ), as well as features that concern vowel sounds, such as various vowel mergers before /r/ (so that Mary , marry , and merry are all commonly pronounced the same ), raising of pre-voiceless /aɪ/ (with price and bright using

14715-513: The same, but one of the parameters changes. However, the absence of minimal pairs for a given pair of phones does not always mean that they belong to the same phoneme: they may be so dissimilar phonetically that it is unlikely for speakers to perceive them as the same sound. For example, English has no minimal pair for the sounds [h] (as in h at ) and [ŋ] (as in ba ng ), and the fact that they can be shown to be in complementary distribution could be used to argue for their being allophones of

14850-483: The second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary (1934), was influential in codifying General American pronunciation standards in writing. He used as a basis his native Midwestern (specifically, northern Ohio) pronunciation. Kenyon's home state of Ohio , however, far from being an area of "non-regional" accents, has emerged now as a crossroads for at least four distinct regional accents, according to late twentieth-century research. Furthermore, Kenyon himself

14985-412: The sound [t] would produce the different word s t ill , and that sound must therefore be considered to represent a different phoneme (the phoneme /t/ ). The above shows that in English, [k] and [kʰ] are allophones of a single phoneme /k/ . In some languages, however, [kʰ] and [k] are perceived by native speakers as significantly different sounds, and substituting one for the other can change

15120-534: The sounds, as is done in synthetic phonics. Rather, it is taught at the word level and students learn to analyze letter-sound relationships once the word is identified. For example, students analyze letter-sound correspondences such as the ou spelling of / aʊ / in shr ou ds. Also, students might be asked to practice saying words with similar sounds such as b all, b at and b ite. Furthermore, students are taught consonant blends (separate, adjacent consonants) as units, such as br eak or shr ouds. Analogy phonics

15255-512: The spatial-gestural equivalent in sign languages ), and all spoken languages include both consonant and vowel phonemes. Phonemes are primarily studied under the branch of linguistics known as phonology . The English words cell and set have the exact same sequence of sounds, except for being different in their final consonant sounds: thus, /sɛl/ versus /sɛt/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA),

15390-641: The spelling and vice versa, provided the rules are consistent. Sign language phonemes are bundles of articulation features. Stokoe was the first scholar to describe the phonemic system of ASL . He identified the bundles tab (elements of location, from Latin tabula ), dez (the handshape, from designator ), and sig (the motion, from signation ). Some researchers also discern ori (orientation), facial expression or mouthing . Just as with spoken languages, when features are combined, they create phonemes. As in spoken languages, sign languages have minimal pairs which differ in only one phoneme. For instance,

15525-482: The spelling of those words. As a result, the written form of English includes the spelling patterns of many languages ( Old English , Old Norse , Norman French , Classical Latin and Greek , as well as numerous modern languages) superimposed upon one another. These overlapping spelling patterns mean that in many cases the same sound can be spelled differently (e.g., tr ay and br ea k) and the same spelling can represent different sounds (e.g., m oo n and b oo k). However,

15660-494: The spelling patterns usually follow certain conventions. In addition, the Great Vowel Shift , a historical linguistic process in which the quality of many vowels in English changed while the spelling remained as it was, greatly diminished the transparency of English spelling in relation to pronunciation. The result is that English spelling patterns vary considerably in the degree to which they follow rules. For example,

15795-551: The standards of the U.S. Every Student Succeeds Act , and the What Works Clearinghouse . There are many ways that phonics is taught and it is often taught together with some of the following: oral language skills, concepts about print, phonological awareness , phonemic awareness , phonology , oral fluency , vocabulary, syllables , reading comprehension , spelling , word study, cooperative learning , multisensory learning , and guided reading . And, phonics

15930-574: The structure of the lesson plans, and the time devoted to specific instructions. Systematic phonics has gained increased acceptance in different parts of the world since the completion of three major studies into teaching reading; one in the United States in 2000, another in Australia in 2005, and another in the UK in 2006. In 2009, the UK Department of Education published a curriculum review that added support for systematic phonics, which in

16065-442: The study of sign languages . A chereme , as the basic unit of signed communication, is functionally and psychologically equivalent to the phonemes of oral languages, and has been replaced by that term in the academic literature. Cherology , as the study of cheremes in language, is thus equivalent to phonology. The terms are not in use anymore. Instead, the terms phonology and phoneme (or distinctive feature ) are used to stress

16200-507: The surface form that is actually uttered and heard. Allophones each have technically different articulations inside particular words or particular environments within words , yet these differences do not create any meaningful distinctions. Alternatively, at least one of those articulations could be feasibly used in all such words with these words still being recognized as such by users of the language. An example in American English

16335-422: The table below to support students increasing ability to construct a rhyming word pattern of similar phonemes or speech sound: Diagraphs Sounds Sounds Diphthongs General American English This is an accepted version of this page General American English , known in linguistics simply as General American (abbreviated GA or GenAm ), is the umbrella accent of American English spoken by

16470-503: The term Standard American English , which he defines as a level of American English pronunciation "employed by educated speakers in formal settings", while still being variable within the U.S. from place to place, and even from speaker to speaker. However, the term "standard" may also be interpreted as problematically implying a superior or "best" form of speech. The terms Standard North American English and General North American English , in an effort to incorporate Canadian speakers under

16605-687: The term continue to be debated, and the scholars who use it today admittedly do so as a convenient basis for comparison rather than for exactness. Some scholars prefer other names, such as Standard American English . Standard Canadian English accents may be considered to fall under General American, especially in opposition to the United Kingdom 's Received Pronunciation . Noted phonetician John C. Wells , for instance, claimed in 1982 that typical Canadian English accents align with General American in nearly every situation where British and American accents differ . The term "General American"

16740-469: The term is understood to refer to a continuum of American speech, with some slight internal variation, but otherwise characterized by the absence of " marked " pronunciation features: those perceived by Americans as strongly indicative of a fellow American speaker's regional origin, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status. Despite confusion arising from the evolving definition and vagueness of the term "General American" and its consequent rejection by some linguists,

16875-403: The term persists mainly as a reference point to compare a baseline "typical" American English accent with other Englishes around the world (for instance, see Comparison of General American and Received Pronunciation ). Though General American accents are not commonly perceived as associated with any region, their sound system does have traceable regional origins: specifically, the English of

17010-405: The true minimal constituents of language. Features overlap each other in time, as do suprasegmental phonemes in oral language and many phonemes in sign languages. Features could be characterized in different ways: Jakobson and colleagues defined them in acoustic terms, Chomsky and Halle used a predominantly articulatory basis, though retaining some acoustic features, while Ladefoged 's system

17145-403: The velar nasal is really the sequence [ŋɡ]/. The theory of generative phonology which emerged in the 1960s explicitly rejected the structuralist approach to phonology and favoured the mentalistic or cognitive view of Sapir. These topics are discussed further in English phonology#Controversial issues . Phonemes are considered to be the basis for alphabetic writing systems. In such systems

17280-554: The vowel normally transcribed /aɪ/ would instead be /aj/ , /aʊ/ would be /aw/ and /ɑː/ would be /ah/ , or /ar/ in a rhotic accent if there is an ⟨r⟩ in the spelling. It is also possible to treat English long vowels and diphthongs as combinations of two vowel phonemes, with long vowels treated as a sequence of two short vowels, so that 'palm' would be represented as /paam/. English can thus be said to have around seven vowel phonemes, or even six if schwa were treated as an allophone of /ʌ/ or of other short vowels. In

17415-444: The word sing , change the ng sound to the t sound) , or removing a sound (e.g., In the word park , remove the p sound) . Phonemic awareness and the resulting knowledge of spoken language is the most important determinant of a child's early reading success. Phonemic awareness is sometimes taught separately from phonics and at other times it is the result of phonics instruction (i.e. segmenting or blending phonemes with letters). It

17550-417: The words betting and bedding might both be pronounced [ˈbɛɾɪŋ] . Under the generative grammar theory of linguistics, if a speaker applies such flapping consistently, morphological evidence (the pronunciation of the related forms bet and bed , for example) would reveal which phoneme the flap represents, once it is known which morpheme is being used. However, other theorists would prefer not to make such

17685-410: The words have different meanings, English-speakers must be conscious of the distinction between the two sounds. Signed languages, such as American Sign Language (ASL), also have minimal pairs, differing only in (exactly) one of the signs' parameters: handshape, movement, location, palm orientation, and nonmanual signal or marker. A minimal pair may exist in the signed language if the basic sign stays

17820-451: The written symbols ( graphemes ) represent, in principle, the phonemes of the language being written. This is most obviously the case when the alphabet was invented with a particular language in mind; for example, the Latin alphabet was devised for Classical Latin, and therefore the Latin of that period enjoyed a near one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes in most cases, though

17955-694: Was fonema , the basic unit of what they called psychophonetics . Daniel Jones became the first linguist in the western world to use the term phoneme in its current sense, employing the word in his article "The phonetic structure of the Sechuana Language". The concept of the phoneme was then elaborated in the works of Nikolai Trubetzkoy and others of the Prague School (during the years 1926–1935), and in those of structuralists like Ferdinand de Saussure , Edward Sapir , and Leonard Bloomfield . Some structuralists (though not Sapir) rejected

18090-475: Was first disseminated by American English scholar George Philip Krapp , who in 1925 described it as an American type of speech that was " Western " but "not local in character". In 1930, American linguist John Samuel Kenyon , who largely popularized the term, considered it equivalent to the speech of "the North" or "Northern American", but, in 1934, "Western and Midwestern". Now typically regarded as falling under

18225-592: Was vocally opposed to the notion of any superior variety of American speech. General American, like the British Received Pronunciation (RP) and prestige accents of many other societies, has never been the accent of the entire nation, and, unlike RP, does not constitute a homogeneous national standard. Starting in the 1930s, nationwide radio networks adopted non-coastal Northern U.S. rhotic pronunciations for their "General American" standard. The entertainment industry similarly shifted from

#494505