Random Image for phonemics
Image originally shown at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Aymara-phonemics-ES-01-a.png
Image for phonemics
Possible definitions for phonemics
phonetics
Study of speech sounds. It deals with their articulation (articulatory phonetics), their acoustic properties (acoustic phonetics), and how they combine to make syllables, words, and sentences (linguistic phonetics). The first phoneticians were Indian scholars (c.300 BC) who tried to preserve the pronunciation of Sanskrit holy texts. The classical Greeks are credited as the first to base a writing system on a phonetic alphabet. Modern phonetics began with Alexander Melville Bell (1819-1905), whose Visible Speech (1867) introduced a system of precise notation for writing down speech sounds. In the 20th cent., linguists have focused on developing a classification system that can permit comparison of all human speech sounds. Another concern of modern phonetics is the mental processes of speech perception.
phonics
Method of reading instruction that breaks language down into its simplest components. Children learn the sounds of individual letters first, then the sounds of letters in combination and in simple words. Simple reading exercises with a controlled vocabulary reinforce the process. Phonics-based instruction has declined in recent years in the face of competition from "whole-language" instruction, in which children are introduced to whole words at a time, are given real literature rather than reading exercises, and are encouraged to keep journals in which they were permitted to spell creatively. A strong backlash against whole-language teaching has made reading instruction a battlefield, and most teachers today favor a combination of the two techniques.
Top words beginning with P: planetless, poppled, photoinhibition, pithiest, pithecanthropoid, pondus, plummer, pseudothalidomide, perilabyrinth, periled, physiopathologies, puerperous, prisonlike, postcritical, partitioned, prevenience, prestimulus, pitapat, pellaea, pccf
Browse the alphabet: A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z