Phoneme The form in which a sound is stored in the abstract mental grammar The form underlying a set of surface

allophones The minimal unit of language that suffices to distinguish meaning (e.g. in cat vs. hat) Allophone Member of a set of speech sounds identified by a native speaker as the same sound A non-contrastive surface manifestation of a phoneme Complementary distribution When two or more sounds occur in non-overlapping phonetic environments If two sounds are in complementary distribution, they are normally allophones of the same phoneme Free variation When two or more allophones freely occur in the same phonetic environment with no semantic effect nrelease in final voiceless stops in English Minimal pair Two words that differ only by a single sound in the same position and have different meanings but are otherwise identical (e.g. cat:hat) NB finding minimal pairs is an essential component of linguistic analysis/reasoning, and is a variant of the process of employing controls to isolate independent variables in science near minimal pairs can also be used if perfect minimal pairs are not available, as long as the distribution of the two sounds cannot be predicted based on the qualities that keep the pair from being perfectly minimal.