ABSTRACT
Phonemes Speech is a continuous flow of sound with interruptions only when necessary to take in air to breathe, or to organise our thoughts. The first task when analysing speech is to divide up this continuous flow into smaller chunks that are easier to deal with. We call this process segmentation, and the resulting smaller sound units are termed segments (these correspond very roughly to vowels and consonants). There is a good degree of agreement among native speakers on what constitutes a speech segment. If English speakers are asked how many speech sounds there are in man, they will almost certainly say ‘three’, and will state them to be [m], [æ] and [n] (see pp. 15-16 for symbols).
