Allophone used in a sentence

Allophone in a sentence as a noun

English does have the sound, but only as an allophone of t when it's preceded by s.

Compare German 'sch', or 'st', Italian 'sci' etc."th" representing both voiced and unvoiced interdental fricatives is what's called an "allophone" [2].

There's a real difference in that for a speaker of a language where those are two allophones of the same phoneme, butter and bu'er mean the same thing; they're the same word pronounced differently.

But this claim had been mitigated by subsequent research that suggests it is context dependent, as well as less certainty about phoneme vs. allophone distinctions.

A speaker can pronounce a phoneme as well as the allophone that is easiest to pronounce for them, a listener can distinguish a pair of phonemes as well as the most similar combination of allophones from them.

The original research by a Japanese linguist into this phenomenon in the 70s suggested it was impossible because of the way phoneme and allophone acquisition happens in childhood.