A phone is a sound unit or segment phonetically produced by our speech organs. It is also called a phonetic unit or segment. A phoneme is a family or class of these phonetic segments which have certain significant features (such as voiced and voiceless features) that distinguish it from others. It serves to contrast the meanings of words. A phoneme is, therefore a distinctive phnetic segment that has the contrastive function of making two words distinct in meaning. For example, /p/ adn /b/ are two consonat phonemes in which /p/ is voiceless and /b/ voiced. They function to contrast the meaning of the minimal-paired words "pat-bat" and "tap-tab." These pairs of words which differ only by one phoneme are called minimal pairs. English has many minimal pairs. The study of such minimal-paired is called phonemics. Notice that a phoneme is placed between slashes / / to distinguish it from an ordinary alphabet letter. AMERICAN ENGLISH PHONETICS p3 --

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