phoneme
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- Academia - Definition of the phoneme and its functions
- CORE - The Status of the Concept of ‘Phoneme’ in Psycholinguistics
- University of Birmingham - School of Computer Science - Phones and Phonemes
- Literary Devices - Phoneme
- National Center for Biotechnology Information - PubMed Central - Language and Reading: the Role of Morpheme and Phoneme Awareness
- Social Sciences LibreTexts - Phonemes
phoneme, in linguistics, smallest unit of speech distinguishing one word (or word element) from another, as the element p in “tap,” which separates that word from “tab,” “tag,” and “tan.” A phoneme may have more than one variant, called an allophone (q.v.), which functions as a single sound; for example, the p’s of “pat,” “spat,” and “tap” differ slightly phonetically, but that difference, determined by context, has no significance in English. In some languages, where the variant sounds of p can change meaning, they are classified as separate phonemes—e.g., in Thai the aspirated p (pronounced with an accompanying puff of air) and unaspirated p are distinguished one from the other.
Phonemes are based on spoken language and may be recorded with special symbols, such as those of the International Phonetic Alphabet. In transcription, linguists conventionally place symbols for phonemes between slash marks: /p/. The term phoneme is usually restricted to vowels and consonants, but some linguists extend its application to cover phonologically relevant differences of pitch, stress, and rhythm. Nowadays the phoneme often has a less central place in phonological theory than it used to have, especially in American linguistics. Many linguists regard the phoneme as a set of simultaneous distinctive features rather than as an unanalyzable unit.