ABSTRACT
When babies are learning language, where do they begin? Theories of language acquisition used to assume that they began with the ‘phoneme’. ‘Phoneme’ is a term used to refer to the individual sound elements that appear to make up words in languages. As literate adults, we hear these ‘phonemes’ very easily. We hear a spoken word like ‘cat’, and we hear three sound elements, that correspond to the ‘sounds’ made by the letters C, A and T. Classical linguistics assumed that all languages were based on two types of phoneme: consonant (C) phonemes and vowel (V) phonemes. The elements used in a particular language were thought to be selected from a repertoire of around 600 consonants and 200 vowels that were distinctive to the human brain.
