Naturalness and markedness are complementary terms to classify speech sounds. Specifically, natural features are thought to be easier to articulate, acquired earlier by children, and more common in/across languages. Marked features, however, are considered more difficult to articulate, acquired later, and are less common across languages.
A pair of words that differ by one phoneme is known as a minimal pair. When the distinguishing phonemes differ minimally, such as by one characteristic, they are considered minimal opposing minimal pairs (/si/ see and /ti/ tea). In contrast, when the distinguishing phonemes differ by many features they are
All three, phones, phonemes, and allophones, are terms for speech sounds depending on how they function in a given language. Specifically, the term phone is used when a speech sound is considered separate from language. Allophones are phonetic variations of a phenome that do not change spoken word meaning, while
Rules for what speech sound can occur in a language and how those speech sounds combine to create words is known as phonotactics. An example would be that phonotactics guide the number of syllables that are permissible in words, what are permissible as word positions for vowels and consonants, the