High School

The following is on Linguistic Languages: Spanish/Portuguese/English

The difference between a letter and a phoneme is:

A. Letters are symbols used to depict written words, whereas phonemes are speech sounds.
B. Each letter may stand for no sound, one sound, or more than one sound, while one phoneme always stands for one sound.
C. Different letters may be pronounced in the same way, but different phonemes are never pronounced in the same way.
D. All of the above.

Answer :

Letters are symbols used to represent sounds in writing, while phonemes are the smallest units of sound in speech. The correct answer is d) All of the above.

Each letter can represent various sounds, but a phoneme always stands for one specific sound.

Letters and phonemes serve distinct roles in language. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that makes a meaningful difference in a language; for instance, the word 'bit' has three phonemes: /b/, /i/, and /t/. In contrast, a letter is a symbol used to represent these sounds in written form.

There are key differences:

  1. Letters are symbols used to depict written words, whereas phonemes are speech sounds.
  2. Each letter may stand for no sound, one sound, or more than one sound, whereas one phoneme always stands for one distinct sound.
  3. Different letters may be pronounced in the same way, but different phonemes are never pronounced in the same way.

The correct answer is d).