Chapter 4 Questions (Freeman and Freeman)

Chapter 4 Questions                         Page 96 and 97            Freeman and Freeman

5. There are 39 phonemes. (Freeman, 86) A phoneme is a family of similar sounds, which a language treats as being “the same”. Members of the family are called allophones. All phonemes have allophones variations. (Freeman, 87)  An example would be the /p/ in pit and spit. There is more of a puff behind the p in the word pit. In general they are the sounds that make a difference in the meaning of English.

Another example of phonemes and allophones is the /k/ sound in kit and skit. Adults are good at ignoring this physical different because what matters is that this is an instance of /k/.  (Freeman, 87)

Different Languages have different groupings for their phonemes. An example is the p and ph sounds are different in the Chinese language. Immigrants may change some habits to become more like the people in their country, phonemes become similar to the phonemes next to them. (Freeman, 87) In some languages each letter in the spelling system represents one phonemes. Although in English the spelling is a poor match between spelling and phonemes.

6. Dialects are interesting to me. I find the fact that we all live in a certain area but can all speak with a enough of a sound difference to tell where you were born is amazing. I was born in Atlanta, Georgia and lived there until I was 4. Then we moved to Pittsburgh, Pa where I remained until college. I went to visit my family in GA over Easter and within moments of being down there I could hear some of the southern dialect coming out in my own speech.

Dialects are not a problem from a socipsycholinguistic view it is more from word recognition view. One word that I struggle with till this day is pen. When I say it many people think I am saying pin. So I found in our reading that is one of the words that southern struggle with so that made me happy. J

I think certain dialects give people a certain perspective and people judge people from their dialect. A few examples of this might be if you hear someone with a southern dialect you will assume they are slow paced, very sweet and charming, and maybe not the brightest. If you hear someone with a New York dialect you might think of them as being rude, pushy, and in a rush. Then there is the Boston dialect again you might think of them as rude, self-center, and fast paced. Again you might not even know the person but do to the dialect make these assumptions.

I know that news anchors have to take classes if they are hired to help train them to decrease or get rid of their dialect so it does not influence the audience watching the news. I found that amazing when I heard that.

In closing, I think if we all talked the same it would be sad because we would not have certain pieces of us to share with others. We would all be like robots. I think it is important to be ourselves and as humans we should know that just because we speak with a dialect don’t mean that we are all the same way….we are speak different so we all can act differently too!