Differentiate Allophone and Phoneme.

  A phoneme is an individual unit of sound in the word. It is any of the perceptually distinct units of the sound of a specified language that distinguish one word from another. Slashes represent it. Allophone is a phonetic variation of phonemes that actually pronounces speech sounds. Brackets represent it. A phoneme is a mental abstract representation of speech sound, a mental category it is a psychological reality so whenever we are producing phonemes it only exists in our minds when we are actually speaking it that when we use allophones. The phonetics realization of a phoneme can be realized as one or more different allophones depending on the environment in which that sound appears. Allophones are predictable where they are going to happen. They are in the complimentary distribution even when using the aspirated sound or unaspirated sound it does not change its meaning. The phoneme is called a contrastive distribution which means that they can produce a change in meaning so how each sound individually is meaning less but when they combine together with other sounds that's when they take on meaning.

Phonemes and allophones are both objects of phonological analysis. The difference between the two is that phoneme is considered an abstract sound type while allophones is a real speech sound or realization of phonemes in speech. A phoneme is limited in number while allophones are unlimited in number. Phonemes can differentiate lexical and grammatical when opposed to another phoneme while allophones cannot differentiate meanings of words.