# On the Use/Misuse of the Term 'Phoneme'

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.11640 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11640/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jul 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Double Articulation Analyzer with Prosody for Unsupervised Word and Phoneme Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08199/) (2021)
- [Common Phone: A Multilingual Dataset for Robust Acoustic Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05912/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Automatic Speech Recognition: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04897/) (2021)
- [Beyond the binary: Limitations and possibilities of gender-related speech technology research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13335/) (2024)
- [Small Language Models Also Work With Small Vocabularies: Probing the Linguistic Abilities of Grapheme- and Phoneme-Based Baby Llamas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01487/) (2024)
- [The Phonetic Footprint of Parkinson's Disease](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11514/) (2021)
- [Differentially Private Adapters for Parameter Efficient Acoustic Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11360/) (2023)
- [MUSCAT: MUltilingual, SCientific ConversATion Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15929/) (2026)
- [Selective Augmentation: Improving Universal Automatic Phonetic Transcription via G2P Bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27204/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The term 'phoneme' lies at the heart of speech science and technology, and yet it is not clear that the research community fully appreciates its meaning and implications. In particular, it is suspected that many researchers use the term in a casual sense to refer to the sounds of speech, rather than as a well defined abstract concept. If true, this means that some sections of the community may be missing an opportunity to understand and exploit the implications of this important psychological phenomenon. Here we review the correct meaning of the term 'phoneme' and report the results of an investigation into its use/misuse in the accepted papers at INTERSPEECH-2018. It is confirmed that a significant proportion of the community (i) may not be aware of the critical difference between `phonetic' and 'phonemic' levels of description, (ii) may not fully understand the significance of 'phonemic contrast', and as a consequence, (iii) consistently misuse the term 'phoneme'. These findings are discussed, and recommendations are made as to how this situation might be mitigated.