Can words with the same sounds have a different number of phonemes?
Yes! The words ‘lox’ and ‘locks’ have the same sounds, but lox has three phonemes and locks has four.
A phoneme is the smallest unit of a spoken language that conveys meaning. The last part of this definition is important: when a phoneme is deleted from a word or substituted with another phoneme, the meaning of the word changes or becomes nonsense.
Most phonemes consist of a single sound, but some phonemes, such as the phoneme ks represented by the letter x, consists of two sounds. The/ks/sound in lox is considered to be a single phoneme because it confers meaning: substitute the/ks/sound in this word with the /b/ sound, and the meaning changes from ‘brined, smoked salmon’ to ‘to throw’.
The s in locks, by contrast, is a distinct phoneme from the k because it changes the word from singular to plural. Lox and locks have exactly the same sounds, but because of the way phoneme is defined, lox has three phonemes (l, o, and ks), and locks has four (l, o, k, and s).
What does this mean for educators? Studies show that students learn best when they understand that language is composed of phonemes. This does not mean that they need to know the precise academic definition of phoneme. Rather, they simply need to know that language is composed of sounds, and that sounds are represented by letters. When teaching a phoneme with two sounds, simply say the sound unit and tell the students how this sound unit is spelled.
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