1.????? Phonological concept

Phoneme: It is an abstract collection of phonetic features which can distinguish meaning.

Phone: It is a basic unit of phonetic study which possibly cannot distinguish meaning.

Allophone: It is a set of phones which relate to the same phoneme.

2.????? Phonological theory

1. A minimal pair: It refers to two different linguistic forms which are identical in every way except for one sound segment, which occurs in the same place in the string.

2. Phonotactics: It refers to some constraints on the sequence or position of English phonemes.

3. Syllable: It must have a vowel or vowel-like sound, including diphthongs. General speaking, it can be dissected into two parts, onset and rhyme. Sometimes, the rhyme consists of nucleus and coda, meanwhile, one or more consonants mostly lie in the onset and coda whereas a vowel is treated as the nucleus. If syllables have no coda, they are known as open syllables. If a coda is present, they are called closed syllables.

4. Consonant cluster: Generally, the basic structure of the kind of syllable can be listed in the following circumstances like V, CV, CCV, CVC, VC, VCC. However, English has larger onset clusters, which is called CCC. Certainly, this structure has some sequential rules or phonotactics. The first consonant must be /s/, followed by one of voiceless stops (/t/. /p/, /k/) and a liquid or a glide (/l/, /r/, /w/).

5. Coarticulation effect

6. Assimilation: one sound influences a neighboring sound, which has some characteristics of the former one.

7. Elision: There is no [d] or [t] in everyday pronunciation of a word, sometimes including vowel sounds. It is similar to the Deletion rule. This isn’t lazy, it’s efficiency.