phonemes and allophones

What is a phoneme?

• a contrastive unit of sound

• A category (like a number category)

• Signal a difference in meaning by being different from the other sound units in a system

• e.g hit vs hill vs him

What is an allophone?

• specific sounds within the overall ‘bundle’ of a phoneme

• Allophones belong to phonemes

What is an allograph?

• the written equivalent of allophone

• But different visual forms of the same grapheme (different fonts or cursive vs print)

• e.g. “a” and “ɑ” are allographs of the grapheme <a> because they represent the same written unit

What is a grapheme?

• the smallest unit of a written language, like a letter or a group of letters that represent a single phoneme.

• For instance, in “Shin”, the digraph “sh” is a grapheme for the /ʃ/ sound.

Clinical relevance of phonemes and allophones

• there are a range of acceptable ways to produce each phoneme

• We need to know which ones are acceptable, and to be able to hear the difference between them

• We need to be able to transcribe what our clients have said: is it an acceptable allophone, or a speech for?

What are vowel phonemes?

• vowel phonemes work in the same way as consonant phonemes: they are bundles of sounds which contain specific variants (allophone)

• This means that the English vowel quadrilarteral, might be quite different to your own realisation

• FOOT /ʊ/

• STRUT /ʌ/

• Not all accents have the STRUT vowel