A Wickelphone is a sequence of three letters or symbols, which occur together in a word. For example, the word strip may be decomposed into a set of trigrams such as rip and str — these are Wickelphones. The term was devised by James McClelland and David Rumelhart in reference to the work of Wayne Wickelgren in 1969.[1] Rumelhart and McClelland then extended the idea by expressing the triples in phonetic terms as Wickelfeatures. For example, the Wickelphone tri would correspond to a Wickelfeature of "stop, lateral, vowel".[2]
