Definition of PHONEMES (original) (raw)
Examples of phoneme in a Sentence
The sounds represented by “c” and “b” are different phonemes, as in the words “cat” and “bat.”
Recent Examples on the Web
Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
Island languages tend to have far fewer phonemes than mainland ones. —Cody Cottier, Discover Magazine, 21 Oct. 2024 Languages differ wildly in their phoneme inventory. —
Cody Cottier, Discover Magazine, 21 Oct. 2024 Certainly, there are clues: music and speech waveforms have distinct pitches (tones sounding high or low), timbres (qualities of sound), phonemes (speech sound units) and melodies. —
Andrew Chang, Scientific American, 18 Sep. 2024 The electrodes picked up the chatter of neurons responsible for articulating word sounds, or phonemes, while other parts of a novel brain-computer interface (BCI) translated that chatter into clear synthetic speech. —
Ingrid Wickelgren, Scientific American, 14 Aug. 2024 Humans are able to learn from very few examples, meaning that even a single encounter can solidify the connection between a silver hand puppet and the phonemes that comprise robot. —
Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic, 5 Apr. 2024 There’s something rhythmic to Athenian gossip, with TV-star names merging with Greek phonemes and the names of islands, ships, and ancient philosophers. —
Virginia Heffernan, WIRED, 14 Feb. 2024 The team recruited two male expert backward speakers for their experiments—both native Spanish speakers since Spanish is especially well-suited, as the phonemes always retain the same sound regardless of their position and surrounding segments. —
Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 14 Sep. 2023 While her attempts at speech do not result in sound, Mrs. Johnson’s weeks of repeating a small vocabulary taught the artificial intelligence deep-learning models her brain patterns along with the 39 phonemes in English – the individual units of sound rather than whole words. —
Cameron Pugh, The Christian Science Monitor, 5 Oct. 2023