What is the difference between a phoneme and a phone?

• A. A phoneme is a concrete sound; a phone is abstract
• B. A phoneme is an abstract sound that differentiates meaning; a phone is a concrete articulation
• C. They are the same
• D. A phoneme is the spelling of a sound

Answer: (B)

At the heart of this distinction is how language treats sounds: phonemes are abstract, mental categories that can differentiate meaning, while phones are the concrete speech sounds you actually hear and produce.

A phoneme represents a kind of sound that matters for meaning in a given language. Different phones can realize the same phoneme depending on context; these are called allophones. For example, the sound you hear as [t] in “top” and the sound [t] (often aspirated as [tʰ]) in other positions are concrete realizations, but they belong to the same underlying phoneme in many languages because switching between them doesn’t usually change the word’s meaning.

A phone, on the other hand, is one specific articulation or acoustic instance of a sound. It is a concrete occurrence, the actual spoken instance you can transcribe or record.

So the correct statement captures that distinction: a phoneme is an abstract sound that differentiates meaning, while a phone is a concrete articulation. The other descriptions misplace either the abstract versus concrete roles, equate phonemes with spelling, or claim they are the same.