What is an Education Savings Account (ESA)?
The state puts funds into a special savings account that parents manage for educational expenses. These funds represent part or all of the money the state would have spent to educate the child in public school. This can then be used for qualifying expenses that can include tutoring, test prep,
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What are Intelligibility, Acceptability, and Comprehensibility?
Intelligibility is the degree or level to which a listener understands a speaker’s given message. There are three methods for assessing intelligibility that includes rating scales, connected speech measures, and single word measures. A listener’s ratings may depend on their relationship with the speaker, a family member as opposed to
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What are Phonological Theories?
There are some phonological theories, but the two classic theories are generative phonology and natural phonology. Generative phonology includes the tenet that underlying phonological representations are translated into allophones according to the rules of grammar of the phonological system to create a surface phonetic representation. Natural phonology explains why children
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What is Sonority?
The abstract concept that refers to the amount of sound in a speech segment. Some sounds are more sonorous than others with a sonority hierarchy arranging sound from most to least. Other sonority concepts should also be considered to include the sonority sequencing principle and the difference score. Taken together
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What are Naturalness and Markedness?
Naturalness and markedness are complementary terms to classify speech sounds. Specifically, natural features are thought to be easier to articulate, acquired earlier by children, and more common in/across languages. Marked features, however, are considered more difficult to articulate, acquired later, and are less common across languages.
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What are Minimal Pairs?
A pair of words that differ by one phoneme is known as a minimal pair. When the distinguishing phonemes differ minimally, such as by one characteristic, they are considered minimal opposing minimal pairs (/si/ see and /ti/ tea). In contrast, when the distinguishing phonemes differ by many features they are
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What are Phones, Phonemes, and Allophones?
All three, phones, phonemes, and allophones, are terms for speech sounds depending on how they function in a given language. Specifically, the term phone is used when a speech sound is considered separate from language. Allophones are phonetic variations of a phenome that do not change spoken word meaning, while
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What are Phonotactics?
Rules for what speech sound can occur in a language and how those speech sounds combine to create words is known as phonotactics. An example would be that phonotactics guide the number of syllables that are permissible in words, what are permissible as word positions for vowels and consonants, the
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What are Intonations and Tones?
Tones are the pitch patterns of individual words and syllables as opposed to intonations that reflect the pitch of an utterance (rising and falling pitch). Tone serves a phonemic function when present in tonal languages such as Cantonese, those changes in tone by height, contour, and duration to alter the
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What are Primary, Secondary and Weak Stress?
There are three types of stress related to words. These are primary, secondary, and weak stress. Primary stress denotes the strongest syllable of a word, secondary denotes strong syllables with less emphasis than the primary, and weak syllables are typically realized by the schwa. In English can also be used
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