ABSTRACT
The relationship between the letters on the page and the sounds they represent is not always a consistent one. Many letters, like ‘a’, can stand for several sounds; other letters–such as ‘c’ and ‘k’–can sound the same. The series of ‘phonemes’ that makes up the sounds of a language is a set of agreed signals of meaning. It does not cover all the sounds possible in a language, which is why each language has a different range of ‘phonemes’, but within a fairly wide range of accents there is enough agreement about the symbols to make us intelligible to each other. Children can easily understand the different pronunciations of words; they hear the symbolic meaning of the word despite the wide range of actual sounds used to pronounce it. The same acceptance of symbolic value is seen in the way that a ‘grapheme’ can be understood despite the variety of ways in which it can be written.
