Word.ws English Dictionary

fis phenomenon

fis phenomenon noun: the observation that a child's perception of phonemes occurs earlier than the ability to produce them.

Noun

fis phenomenon

  1. The observation that a child's perception of phonemes occurs earlier than the ability to produce them.

Origin of fis phenomenon

From an incident reported in 1960 by J. Berko and R. Brown. A child referred to his inflatable plastic fish as a fis, but rejected adults' statements that used the same mispronunciation.

Questions about fis phenomenon

What does fis phenomenon mean?
Fis phenomenon means the observation that a child's perception of phonemes occurs earlier than the ability to produce them.
What part of speech is fis phenomenon?
Fis phenomenon is a noun.

Words near fis phenomenon in the dictionary

  1. Firun'baidhoo
  2. firwood
  3. firwoods
  4. firy
  5. FIS
  6. fis phenomenon
  7. FISA
  8. Fisaumme
  9. fisavirus
  10. fisaviruses
  11. fisbo

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fis phenomenon (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “fis phenomenon.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fis_phenomenon. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.