A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in speech. When children first begin to read, we teach that phonemes have distinctive sounds that are represented by letters and that each phoneme carries distinct word meaning. For example, the word 'cat' has three phonemes, 'c' 'a' and 't', but if 'c' is changed for the other phoneme 'mat', the meaning of the word changes.
Allophones are variations in the realization (or sound) of phonemes, like the different pronunciations of the phoneme 't' in the word 'tar' and the word 'letter', where the 't' allophone (sound) is softened to a 'd' sound. Allophones do not indicate a change in the meaning of the word, nor do they indicate a change in the phoneme used to make up the word.
A difference between the two is that changing the phoneme changes the meaning of the word, whereas changing the allophone changes the sound of the realization of word but does not change the meaning of the word.
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