Phoneme

A phoneme is an abstract sound category in a language that distinguishes words or morphemes. Its members may differ phonetically while functioning as the same category.

Minimal pair: A pair of words differing in one sound and meaning, used to demonstrate a contrast between sounds. Minimal pairs reveal whether two sounds distinguish words in a language.
Complementary distribution: A pattern in which two sounds occur in mutually exclusive phonetic environments. This distribution can show that two sounds are allophones of one phoneme.
Phone: A concrete speech sound considered without regard to its linguistic role. A phone is an actual sound; a phoneme is an abstract contrastive category.
Phonemic awareness: The ability to notice and manipulate individual phonemes in spoken words. It applies phoneme distinctions to early literacy and reading instruction.
Allophone: A context-dependent or otherwise non-contrastive pronunciation variant of a phoneme. Allophones are distinct pronunciations grouped under one phoneme.
Free variation: The occurrence of multiple forms in the same environment without a change in meaning. It can account for differing pronunciations that do not signal separate phonemes.
Morpheme: The smallest linguistic unit that carries meaning or grammatical function. Phonemes distinguish morphemes but do not themselves carry meaning.
Speech recognition: The computational task of converting spoken language into a textual or symbolic representation. Phoneme models have been used to connect acoustic signals with linguistic units.
Phonetic transcription: A written representation of speech sounds, often using the International Phonetic Alphabet. Transcription distinguishes observed pronunciations from abstract phoneme categories.
Phonotactics: The language-specific rules governing how sounds can combine and where they can occur. Phonotactic patterns constrain where a phoneme may appear in a word.

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