Phonology

Question 1

What is meant by the lack of invariance and speech segmentation
problems in speech perception?

Answer 1

A longstanding problem is the lack of invariant mappings between acoustic patterns and perceptual interpretation of speech. Speech sounds are coarticulated into the context of an utterance so their patterns change in different phonetic contexts.

Question 2

What is a phoneme vs. allophone?

Answer 2

Phonemes are abstract mental representations of sounds that can distinguish one word from another, while allophones are concrete sounds that represent a variant pronunciation of a phoneme in a specific context.
Phonemes are placed between slashes // and allophones in square brackets []