speech sound

In phonetics and linguistics, a phone is any distinct speech sound or gesture, regardless of whether or not the exact sound is critical to the meanings of words. In contrast, a phoneme is a speech sound that, in a given language, if it were swapped with another phoneme, would change the meaning of the word. Phones are absolute, not specific to any language, but phonemes can be discussed only in reference to specific languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_(phonetics)