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Infants are born able to understand all phonemes, but they lose their ability to do so as they get
older; by 10 months of age a child’s ability to recognize phonemes becomes very similar to that
of the adult speakers of the native language. Phonemes that were initially differentiated come to
be treated as equivalent (Werker & Tees, 2002). [1]
Figure 9.11
When adults hear speech sounds that gradually change from one phoneme to another, they do not hear the
continuous change; rather, they hear one sound until they suddenly begin hearing the other. In this case, the change
is from /ba/ to /pa/.
Source: Adapted from Wood, C. C. (1976). Discriminability, response bias, and phoneme categories in
discrimination of voice onset time. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 60(6), 1381–1389.
Whereas phonemes are the smallest units of sound in language, a morphemeis a string of one or
more phonemes that makes up the smallest units of meaning in a language. Some morphemes,
such as one-letter words like “I” and “a,” are also phonemes, but most morphemes are made up
of combinations of phonemes. Some morphemes are prefixes and suffixes used to modify other
words. For example, the syllable “re-” as in “rewrite” or “repay” means “to do again,” and the
suffix “-est” as in “happiest” or “coolest” means “to the maximum.”
Syntax is the set of rules of a language by which we construct sentences. Each language has a
different syntax. The syntax of the English language requires that each sentence have a noun and