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Phonemic Awareness Studies 1970s

Contributors:

Cynthia Boles

Deborah Louie

Suzanne Pfeiffer

In linguistics, alternation is the phenomenon where one phoneme (see below) is pronounced differently in different words. It occurs for grammatical, phonological and syntactical reasons. Each pronunciation is called an alternate.

When a rule exists for determining which alternate to use, based on the surrounding sounds, the alternation is called a phonologically conditioned alternation. When there is no such a rule, the alternation is grammatically conditioned. Where a particular alternate is used because the alternative would 'sound wrong', it is called an automatic alternation.

Alternation is a widespread phenomenon in human language, and encompasses many processes such as noun inflection and verb conjugation.

Supplemental information can be found at the following links:

phonemes

Reference

Wikipedia. Retrieved February 14, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternation_%28linguistics%29