ABSTRACT
Virtually any three or four year old child understands a simple, spoken word like “cat”, but if you ask her about the sounds in that word she will be hard put to it to answer your question. Most children of this age would not be able to tell you what the word’s middle sound is, for example, or how the word ends. When children learn to talk, their interest naturally is in the meaning of the words that they speak and hear. The fact that these words can be analysed in a different way—that each word consists of a unique sequence of identifiable sounds—is of little importance to them. They want to know the meaning of what someone else is saying, and they need be no more concerned with the actual sounds that make up each word when they listen to someone speaking than they are with the exact composition of the food that they eat each day.
