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Phoneme Examples

Phonemes are the smallest units of sound in a language that distinguish one word from another. A phoneme is not the same as a letter - there are 44 phonemes in English but only 26 letters. Phonemes can be spelled differently in words. Developing phonemic awareness, which includes skills like phoneme segmentation and blending, is an important part of learning to read. Segmentation involves separating the phonemes in a word while blending combines phonemes to form a new word. There are different types of phonemes including consonants and vowels. The same letters can represent different phonemes depending on context.

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73 views3 pages

Phoneme Examples

Phonemes are the smallest units of sound in a language that distinguish one word from another. A phoneme is not the same as a letter - there are 44 phonemes in English but only 26 letters. Phonemes can be spelled differently in words. Developing phonemic awareness, which includes skills like phoneme segmentation and blending, is an important part of learning to read. Segmentation involves separating the phonemes in a word while blending combines phonemes to form a new word. There are different types of phonemes including consonants and vowels. The same letters can represent different phonemes depending on context.

Uploaded by

Daniel Oluwaseyi
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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It is an important part of learning to read is developing 

phonemic awareness, or
the ability to distinguish and manipulate sounds. What is a phoneme?
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that carries meaning. Readers use
phonemes to distinguish between words. For example, the difference between ''hat''
and ''cat'' is one sound, or phoneme—the phoneme at the beginning of the words.
These phoneme facts will help explain the phoneme definition.

 A phoneme is not a letter. English has 26 letters, but 44 phonemes.


 Most words are made up of two or more phonemes. For example, the word
''is'' contains two distinct sounds or phonemes.
 Phonemes can be spelled differently. The words bait, weight, and plate all
have the same phoneme in the middle of the word, but that phoneme is
spelled in three different ways (ai, eigh, and a).

Two important literacy skills are phoneme segmentation (separating the phonemes
in a word) and phoneme blending (combining separate phonemes to make a
pronounceable word). Phoneme segmentation helps with spelling, while phoneme
blending helps with decoding.

Phoneme Examples
There are 44 phonemes used in English: 24 are consonant phonemes, and 20 are
vowel phonemes. The following chart shows several phoneme examples, as well as
some ways the phoneme can be written and sample words to illustrate the
phoneme's use. Note that this is not an exhaustive list.

Phoneme Graphemes (possible


Examples
Pronunciation spellings)
B b, bb boat, rabbit
K c, ch, k cat, chaos, book
ch ch, tch church, catch
f f, ph fish, phone
t t, th take, thyme
short a a, ai sat, plaid
long e e, ee, ea me, three, wheat
oo oo, ew, ough, ue pool, blew, through,
true
The same combination of letters can represent different phonemes. For example,
''or'' represents a different phoneme in ''book'' than in ''boot.''

2. In the field of linguistics, the word allophone means “other sound.” It is used to


describe when a phoneme (the smallest unit of sound in speech) sounds slightly
different depending on how it is used in a word.
Allophones of /t/

1. Aspirated [tʰ]. / t/ is aspirated when it occurs initially in an accented syllable as


in tin, tear, obtain, attire, try, twice, tune. In all such cases, the vowel or consonant
that immediately follows /t/ becomes devoiced.

2. Unaspirated [t]. / t/ is unaspirated when

(a) it occurs in unaccented syllables as in today, filter, later;

(b) it is preceded by /s/ as stain, stray, stupendous; and

(c) it occurs medially in a syllable as in hats, and bits.


3. Inaudibly released (or unexploded) [t̚]. / t/ is released inaudibly without an
explosion, when

(a) it occurs finally, i.e. before silence, as in hot, wet, late; and

(b) it is followed by another plosive or affricate as in hotbed, white dog, fat child,
that jug.
4. Nasally released [tⁿ]. / t/ is released through the nose when it is followed by /n/
as in button, mutton, or cotton.

5. Laterally released [t‫]׀‬. / t/ is released laterally when it is followed by / l / as


in settle, metal, and cattle.

6. Dental [ t̻ ] /t/ becomes dental plosive if it is followed by the dental fricatives /ð/
and /Ɵ/ as in eighth, sit three.
7. Post-alveolar [tʃ]. / t / is realized as a post-alveolar plosive if it is followed by /
r / as in trick, true, betray.

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