- (A) The “c” in the word cat is best described as a phoneme. Phonemes are the smallest units of
sound in a language. Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a language; the entire word
cat is a morpheme as it cannot be broken down into smaller meaningful units. Holphrases are single
words that toddlers use to express more complex ideas as they first learn language. A toddler might
say “cat,” meaning “look, there’s a cat” or “I’d like to pet that cat.” Like phonemes, syllables are
units of sound, but they are often composed of multiple phonemes; for instance, the word cat
contains three phonemes but only one syllable. A grapheme is a written symbol for a sound in a
language; letters are graphemes but so are the letter combinations that make up multiletter
phonemes, for instance, “ph.”
marvins-underground-k-12
(Marvins-Underground-K-12)
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