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A phoneme is the smallest contrastive segment in a language. Phonemes, by themselves, do not possess any meaning. However, they are contrastive/i>. In other words, by changing a phoneme, one can change the meaning of a word. The phoneme /b/ does not possess any meaning. However, if we take word like pin and change the first phoneme to /b/, we change the word to bin. This changes the meaning from an object that is like a needle to an object that is like a box.
Phonemes as Mental Units