Allophone and phoneme

Phonemes are the important sounds

of a language.

A phoneme is a category of sound

stored in your mind.

It is the mental image of a contrastive

phone.
Allophones are the physical sounds
that correspond to a given phoneme.

Most phonemes have more than one

allophone.

Pronunciation patterns indicate when

the different allophones occur.
/i/
[i]
[ĩ]

“e
“e e ”
a”
/bif/
/bin/
[bif]
[bĩn]

“b
“b eef
ea ”
n”
/phonemes/

[allophones]

s ”
t t er
“l e
 Activity 1
 Review the color classification activity that we did for
the phoneme concept
 How does the concept of allophone relate to the various
colors presented?
 Imagine that you are trying to find your friend’s house.
He tells you that he lives in the only blue house on a
street that has lots of homes.
How important is it that you distinguish between blue and
green colored homes?
Would it matter to you what shade of blue his house was?
How does this example relate to phoneme and allophone?
 Activity 2
 Study the following slide
 What is the common idea represented by all of the
pictures?
 If you desperately needed to use something like this to
rest your feet, would it matter which one you chose?
 Imagine a different set of pictures that represents the
idea “desk”
 How important is it that you distinguish between these 2
sets of pictures?
 How does this example relate to phoneme and allophone?