Allophone

Allophone
Allophones are phonetic variations - different pronunciations - of the same phoneme. Using a different allophone does not change meaning.
Example
The /l/ sound is pronounceddifferently in ‘love' and in ‘wool'. These two words contain allophones of the phoneme /l/.
In the classroom
It is important to be aware of what allophones and phonemes exist in other languages, as these cancause problems when learning the sounds of English. For example, the /b/ and /v/ phonemes in English are only allophones in Spanish and Spanish learners often have difficulty recognizing thedifference. Discrimination activities on minimal pairs of words, distinguished only by the phonemes concerned, can help with this.

In phonology, an allophone ( /ˈæləfoʊn/; from the Greek: ἄλλος, állos,"other" and φωνή, phōnē, "voice, sound") is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds (or phones) used to pronounce a single phoneme.[1] For example, [pʰ] (as in pin) and [p] (as in spin) areallophones for the phoneme /p/ in the English language. Although a phoneme's allophones are all alternative pronunciations for a phoneme, the specific allophone selected in a given situation is oftenpredictable. Changing the allophone used by native speakers for a given phoneme in a specific context usually will not change the meaning of a word but the result may sound non-native or unintelligible.Native speakers of a given language usually perceive one phoneme in their language as a single distinctive sound in that language and are "both unaware of and even shocked by" the allophone variationsused to pronounce single phonemes.[2][3]



For example, [pʰ] as in pin and [p] as in spin are allophones for the phoneme /p/ in the English language because they cannot distinguish words (infact, they occur in complementary distribution). English speakers treat them as the same sound, but they are different: the first is aspirated and the second is unaspirated (plain). Plain [p] also...