The fis phenomenon is a phenomenon of childlanguage acquisition that demonstrates that perception of phonemes occurs earlier than the ability of the child to produce those phonemes.
The name comes from an incident reported in "Psycholinguistic Research Methods" by J. Berko and R. Brown in Handbook of Research methods in Child Development, edited by P. Mussen (New York: John Wiley, 1960). A child referred to his inflatable plastic fish as a fis. However, when adults asked him, "Is this your fis?" he rejected the statement. When he was asked, "Is this your fish?" he responded, "Yes, my fis."
This shows that although the child could not produce the phoneme /ʃ/, he could perceive it as being different from the phoneme /s/. This has important implications for the acquisition of phonology. In short, it means that children have more, not fewer, phonological processes (or rules) applying in their speech than adults, and that part of the task of acquiring a language is figuring out which processes to allow to apply and which to supress.
The FIS is the single strongest and most popular political alternative in the country, and it has already won a clear plurality in Algeria's first and only free national elections in late 1991--only to see the results annulled by the army.
The FIS had had a year or two experience of power, at the municipal level in various cities in Algeria in 1990-1991, in which it was neither especially radical nor especially effective.
Unfortunately, the FIS as of now has no clear-cut policies to address these urgent problems, other than to diversify the economy and seek investment; the FIS will be forced to improvise to a considerable extent and will be heavily dependent on drawing in educated bureaucratic and technical cadres to manage the state.
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