ABSTRACT
The phoneme revisited In Section A2 we introduced the phoneme. We shall now return to examine the concept a little more closely, and consider its place in linguistic organisation. You’ll recall that the phoneme is an abstract unit which may be realised as any one of a number of allophones. Allophones are the concrete entities of speech. The allophones of a particular phoneme typically have phonetic similarity, that is to say, they have both articulatory and acoustic features in common (stated loosely, this implies that they are produced in much the same way by the speaker and sound much the same to the listener).
