In order to pack as much meaning as possible into each word, Ithkuil has fifty-eight phonemes.

NEWYORKER: Utopian for Beginners

But children must hear the basic sounds, or phonemes, of their language before they can become skilled readers.

ECONOMIST: The cat sat on the tam | The

Young children who are poor at mentally dividing spoken words into phonemes almost always develop dyslexia later on.

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Genes change slowly, over many generations, while the diversity of phonemes amid a population group can change rapidly as language evolves.

WSJ: Study Points to a Single, Original Language for All Humans

One of the fundamental characteristics of dyslexia is difficulty in handling written phonemes (the units of sound which make up a language).

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Today, areas such as sub-Saharan Africa that have hosted human life for millennia still use far more phonemes in their languages than more recently colonized regions do.

WSJ: Study Points to a Single, Original Language for All Humans

This isn't just another text-to-speech demo though, StorEbook uses the impressive and appropriately named library of sampled phonemes to speak in unique, realistic voices for each character.

ENGADGET

He also seemed to combine phonemes to construct new words.

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Dr. Atkinson figured that if a similar founder effect could be discerned in phonemes, it would support the idea that modern verbal communication originated on that continent and only then expanded elsewhere.

WSJ: Study Points to a Single, Original Language for All Humans

The game, called Fast ForWord, is meant to improve phoneme recognition by stretching out and accentuating each sound, much as mothers do when they talk baby-talk, until the child's ear becomes more attuned to the different phonemes.

ECONOMIST: The cat sat on the tam | The

In an analysis of 504 world languages, Dr. Atkinson found that, on average, dialects with the most phonemes are spoken in Africa, while those with the fewest phonemes are spoken in South America and on tropical islands in the Pacific.

WSJ: Study Points to a Single, Original Language for All Humans

Consonant-poor Hawaiian has just thirteen phonemes.

NEWYORKER: Utopian for Beginners

The researchers have not shown which aspects of the programme lead to the improvements: a child's language comprehension may improve simply because he or she is forced to listen to a barrage of phonemes, not something that an expensive and complicated computer game is necessary for.

ECONOMIST: The cat sat on the tam | The