Meaning of complementary allophone | Babel Free

Definitions

A variant pronunciations of a phoneme that occur in specific phonetic contexts and do not change the meaning of a word

Examples

“... complementary allophone from the underlying phoneme. In each pair, the unaspirated form has a more general distribution. The aspirated allophone occurs in a very specific set of circumstances: in initial position of a word or stressed[…]”

“... complementary allophone of /i/, its occurrence being largely restricted to positions before /r, h, hw/. Similarly, the emergence of short 〈aú〉 /ɔ/ was primarily associated with PGmc. /u/ preceding the same three consonants. In Early[…]”

CEFR level