They may also offer an explanation of why the process takes place. The explanation to these two questions is the phenomenon of assimilation , the natural process by which a sound changes in order to become more like another sound. We anticipate a sound and this changes another sound. Vowels become nasalized because they assimilate to the nasality of a following nasal. A mental unit of speech is a phoneme .
Phonemes are contrastive sound units which make a difference in words.
Time, dime, rhyme, lime, chime, and mine are a minimal set. Time and dime are a minimal pair. 14 Morpheme is the smallest unit of linguistic meaning or function. Un in undesirable is a morpheme Phon in phonetics is a morpheme. Phonological rules describe the regularities of the sound system of a language.