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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 is the English phoneme /k/ , which occurs in words such as c at , k it , s c at , s k it .
Traditionally, the minimal linguistic unit of phonetics is the phone—a speech sound in a language which differs from the phonological unit of phoneme; the phoneme is an abstract categorization of phones and it is also defined as the smallest unit that discerns meaning between sounds in any given language. [2]
An important part of traditional, pre-generative schools of phonology is studying which sounds can be grouped into distinctive units within a language; these units are known as phonemes. For example, in English, the "p" sound in pot is aspirated (pronounced [pʰ]) while that in spot is not aspirated (pronounced [p]).
Whereas a phone is a concrete sound used across various spoken languages, a phoneme is more abstract and narrowly defined: any class of phones that the users of a particular language nevertheless perceive as a single basic sound, a single unit, and that distinguishes words from other words. If a phoneme is swapped with another phoneme inside a ...
The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators. [ 2 ] [ 3 ] The IPA is designed to represent those qualities of speech that are part of lexical (and, to a limited extent, prosodic ) sounds in oral language ...
A phoneme of a language or dialect is an abstraction of a speech sound or of a group of different sounds that are all perceived to have the same function by speakers of that particular language or dialect. For example, the English word through consists of three phonemes
In linguistics, a segment is "any discrete unit that can be identified, either physically or auditorily, in the stream of speech". [1] The term is most used in phonetics and phonology to refer to the smallest elements in a language, and this usage can be synonymous with the term phone.
In linguistics, a distinctive feature is the most basic unit of phonological structure that distinguishes one sound from another within a language.For example, the feature [+voice] distinguishes the two bilabial plosives: [p] and [b] (i.e., it makes the two plosives distinct from one another).