The different ways the letter T is pronounced in top, stop, and pot demonstrate that the T phoneme has what property?

• A. Morphemes
• B. Allophones
• C. Graphemes
• D. Phonemes

Answer: (B)

Allophony is when a single phoneme shows up as different sounds in different contexts. The T sound in English is a clear example: in a word like top you hear an aspirated [tʰ], while in stop the same T comes out without that strong release and can even be unreleased in some dialects, and in pot the final T can be a tap or a simple release depending on dialect. These variants are allophones of the same phoneme, meaning they’re different surface pronunciations that don’t change the word’s meaning. The underlying category is the phoneme, while allophones are its concrete realizations. The other terms refer to different ideas: morphemes are units of meaning, graphemes are letters, and phonemes are the abstract sound categories that can have multiple allophones.