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Phonemic contrast

Introduction

Phonemic contrast means that minimal phonetic difference, that is, small differences in sounds, such as whether the sound is voiced or unvoiced (consider /b/ and /p/ in English) actually makes a difference in how the sound is perceived by listeners and can therefore lead to different mental lexical entries for words (consider pat and bat in English). Other examples in English of a phonemic contrast would be the difference between leak and league; the minimal difference of voicing between [k] and [g] does lead to the two utterances being perceived as different words. Contrarily, an example that is not a contrast in English is the difference between bit and bi:t (long i). In these cases the minimal difference of vowel length is not a contrast in English and so those two utterances would be perceived as the same word.

Phoneme vs. allophone (Will)

Different sounds, called allophones, can be recognized as being under the umbrella of a single phoneme, for example [z] and [s] in ‘fishes’ and ‘cats’ are both different expressions of the same plural marker, phonemic /s/. Perceptions of what allophones can be grouped under what phonemes can vary even within languages. For example, in Quebec French alveolar stops can become affricates before certain vowels, but in Belgian French these affricates are not recognized as being phonemes of any alveolar stop.

MB comment: You are confusing allophones with allomorphs! Don't do that!

Acquisition of contrasts

In infants

When infants acquire a first language, they at first are sensitive to phonemic contrasts not found in the language they are presently acquiring. Sensitivity to phonemic contrasts is important to infant language acquisition, but also difficult, as they must figure out which contrasts are important for their language and which are not. Some contrasts will confer a change in meaning between words, and others will not. As they acquire language, infants actually become less sensitive to those contrasts not found in their native language, as they are unimportant for distinguishing meaning within that language. Studies have shown, however, that infants do not necessarily pay attention to phonemic differences when acquiring new lexical entries, e.g., 14-month-olds given the made-up labels "daw" and "taw" for new objects used these labels interchangeably to refer to the same object, even though they were capable of perceiving the phonetic difference between /d/ and /t/ and recognizing these as separate phonemes.

In bilingual infants (those acquiring two languages simultaneously), contrasts must be both acquired and kept separate for the two languages, as contrasts present in one language may be allophonic in the other, or some of the phonemes of one language may be absent entirely in the other. The necessity of this separation has implications for the study of language acquisition and in particular simultaneous bilingualism, since there is some debate over whether infants acquiring multiple languages have separate systems for doing so or whether there is a single system in place to handle multiple languages.

In L2 (Will)

Distinguishing between different phonemes in an L2 can be a significantly difficult task. For example, Dutch L2 English speakers were less capable of distinguishing between English  /æ/ and /ɛ/ than Dutch-English bilinguals.

Diaphonemic contrast

An interlanguage phonemic contrast (diaphonemic contrast) is the contrast required to differentiate between two cognate forms coming from two compared varieties or dialects.[5] Within languages that have particular phonemic contrasts there can be dialects that do not have the contrast or contrast differently (such as American South dialect pin/pen merger, where the two are not contrasted, but in other American dialects they are).

Contradicting contrasts for bilinguals

Bilingual speakers often find themselves in situations where a pair of phonemes are contrasted in one of their languages but not in the other. Babies are born with the ability to discriminate all phonemes, but as they age their ability to perceive phoneme boundaries lessens in ways specifically tailored to the language they hear as their input. In order to perceive a particular phonemic contrast, then, the pair must be contrastive in one's input. Generally, the earlier a language and/or phonemic contrast is learned, or is part of the input, the more sensitive a listener is to the phonemic boundaries of that pair and therefore better able to perceive the difference between the contrasting sounds. It is still possible, though, for late learners to acquire the ability to perceive contrasts that are not part of their first language. Consider a study of Japanese-English speakers: Japanese speakers with minimal English exposure were asked to listen to the sounds /r/ and /l/ and discriminate between them. Because there is no contrast between these sounds in Japanese participants did not show an ability to make the discrimination. Japanese speakers that had frequent English exposure were able to discriminate /r/ and /l/ much more effectively, nearly at the rate of Native speakers. Consider also a study of Spanish monolingual, Catalan monolingual, and Spanish-Catalan bilingual children: Catalan utilizes two vowels in the space of a single vowel in Spanish. This means that a speaker of Catalan needs to recognize /e/ and /ε/ as different, contrasting sounds, while a Spanish speaker only need recognize one phoneme. Spanish-Catalan bilinguals, then, need to be able to recognize the contrast to accommodate their Catalan language. In one study, Catalan monolingual toddlers appeared to accurately discriminate between the two vowels while Spanish monolingual toddlers did not appear to make discriminations. Spanish-Catalan bilingual toddlers also did not appear to discriminate between the two vowels. Researchers suggest that input plays a large role in this discrepancy; perhaps the toddlers had not yet received enough input to have gained the ability to make the discrimination, or perhaps their dual input, Spanish and Catalan, both spoken with accents affected by the other as their parents were bilingual speakers, had made them somewhat aloof to the contrast and not likely to recognize a difference. There was evidence, though, that older bilingual children performed better at these discrimination tasks. All being said, it appears that bilinguals that have a particular phonemic contrast in one of their languages but not in the other are, in fact, able to gain the ability to make the discrimination between the contrasting phonemes of the language that has the pair, but that age and especially input are major factors in determining ability to make the discrimination.

Phonological gaps (Rachel)

An accidental gap is a phenomenon in which a form that could plausibly be found in a given language according to its rules is not present. In phonology, this is called a phonological gap and refers to instances in which a set of related segments containing various contrasts, e.g. between voicing (whether or not the vocal cords vibrate) or aspiration (whether a puff of air is released), is lacking a particular member. A contrast that the language could have had is then not realized within the actual language. For example, Thai has several sets of stop consonants that differ in terms of voicing and aspiration, yet the language has no voiced velar consonant /ɡ/, as shown in the table of Thai stop contrasts below.

Thai stop consonants

plain voiceless	aspirated voiceless	voiced consonant
p	pʰ	b
t	tʰ	d
k	kʰ

Neutralization

Some speech phenomena may lead to the neutralization of phonemic contrasts, which means that a contrast that exists in the language is not utilized in order to differentiate words due to sound change. For example, due to final-obstruent devoicing, Russian бес ('demon', phonemically /bʲes/) and без ('without', phonemically /bʲez/) are pronounced identically in isolation as [bʲɛs].