It is only when two previously distinct phonemes are merged or a unitary phoneme splits into two (typically when allophonic variation becomes phonemic) that sound change must definitely be considered as phonological.
The game, called Fast ForWord, is meant to improve phoneme recognition by stretching out and accentuating each sound, much as mothers do when they talk baby-talk, until the child's ear becomes more attuned to the different phonemes.
Again, although the programme can lead to considerable improvements in both phoneme discrimination and reading ability, the way that this comes about is unknown.The furore over Fast ForWord and whether it is truly treating the causes of dyslexia matters a great deal: more sophisticated treatments of dyslexia will only come with a thorough understanding of the cause of the disorder.
This approach known as the Lindamood programme after its developers, Patricia and Charles Lindamood is an intensive reading course that tries to improve phoneme identification by focusing on how children articulate the sounds.
Statistical speech models and a probabilistic technique called Gaussian mixture modelling are then used to identify each phoneme, before reconstructing the original word.
The two researchers are convinced that the brains of dyslexics store an improper and unreliable representation of phoneme sounds.
The reason that phoneme-based speech synthesisers sound robotic, he says, is that they fail to take into account the way in which the pronunciation of each phoneme depends on its neighbours.
Unlike the American phonologists, Trubetskoy and his followers did not take the phoneme to be the minimal unit of analysis.
Roughly speaking, if a character represents a meaningful unit, such as a morpheme or a word, the orthography is called a logographic writing system; if it represents a syllable, it is called a syllabic writing system; if a segment of a syllable, it is called a consonantal writing system or an unvocalized syllabary; and if a phoneme, it is called an alphabetic system.
Some speakers regularize the basic forms of nouns (but not verb stems) so that for them the nonfinal t always represents basic s; they say pas-ey for the standard pat'-ey 'in the field.' The single liquid phoneme has two predictable pronunciations: a clear (and sometimes palatalized) lateral [l] when it is at the end of a syllable or doubled [-l:l-], otherwise (and also before h) the flap [r].
