Archive for February, 2019

The short answer to this question is no. Phonemes are not the basic units of speech. Phonemes are categories of sounds abstracted from the speech of people in a given community that change the meaning of utterances, but they are not separate sounds which are combined together to form speech. They do not exist as […]

Consider the word ‘to’. It is written as two letters with a space either side. Once we have seen it and someone has told us how to pronounce it, we are able to remember ‘to’ in its written form. We learn its sound (phonology) and its spelling (orthography). It is a unit of meaning in […]