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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 cat, kit, scat, skit.
A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. [1] Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this is the distinction, respectively, between free and bound morphemes.
For example, in many varieties of American English, the phoneme /t/ in a word like wet can surface either as an unreleased stop [t̚] or as a flap [ɾ], depending on environment: [wɛt] wet vs. [ˈwɛɾɚ] wetter. (In both cases, however, the underlying representation of the morpheme wet is the same: its phonemic form /wɛt/.)
A phonogram is a grapheme i.e. one or more written characters which represent a phoneme (speech sound), [1] rather than a bigger linguistic unit such as morphemes or words. [2] For example, "igh" is an English-language phonogram that represents the / aɪ / sound in "high".
The isolation form of a morpheme is the form in which that morpheme appears in isolation (when it is not subject to the effects of any other morpheme). In the case of a bound morpheme , such as the English past tense ending "-ed", it is generally not possible to identify an isolation form since such a morpheme does not occur in isolation.
For example, sequence "sl-" appears in English words denoting low-friction motion, like "slide", "slick" and "sled". [3] A phonestheme is different from a phoneme (a basic unit of word-differentiating sound) or a morpheme (a basic unit of meaning) because it does not meet the normal criterion of compositionality. [4] [5]
Examples to show the effectiveness of word-based approaches are usually drawn from fusional languages, where a given "piece" of a word, which a morpheme-based theory would call an inflectional morpheme, corresponds to a combination of grammatical categories, for example, "third-person plural". Morpheme-based theories usually have no problems ...
To perceive speech, the continuous acoustic signal must be converted into discrete linguistic units such as phonemes, morphemes and words. To correctly identify and categorize sounds, listeners prioritize certain aspects of the signal that can reliably distinguish between linguistic categories.