Study of the sound system of the
language. The sounds that the languageuses, as well as the rules for their
combination.
There are around 200 sounds used in
languages throughout the world. No one
language makes use of all 200 sounds.
English has over 40 different sounds.
Sound is at the beginning of language learning. Children have to learn to distinguish different sounds and to segment the speech stream they are exposed to into units – eventually meaningful units
When you read, there are spaces between the words. No such spaces occur between spoken words. So, if an infant hears the sound sequence “thisisacup,” it has to learn to segment this stream into the distinct units “this”, “is”, “a”, and “cup.”
