Is the distinction between phoneme and allophone useful in language learning?

Question

IPA purpose seems straightforward to me: map all the known ways to produce sounds using the mouth to symbols and, for a specific language standard/dialect, map the possible sounds of it to these symbols. Now it is possible to describe the pronunciation of any word of the language/dialect in written form.

However, teachers, dictionaries and phonetic descriptions often uses phonemic transcriptions. As each phonem may be rendered by different allophones, the whole original purpose of IPA is broken IMHO.

Example 1: why use /paɪ/ instead of [pʰaɪ] to describe the pronunciation of the word "pie"? How would a Spanish native know that the initial "p" should be aspirated (Spanish has no aspirated "p")? The same applies for the flap T / D in GA English.

Example 2: GA American phonology Wikipedia shows /ɑ/ (open back unrounded vowel) as a central vowel in its vowel trapezoid diagram. Why not use the allophone [ä] instead, making clearer which is the standard sound?

The distinction between phonems and allophones may be useful in linguistics discussions, but I really do not understand its usefulness in language learning. It seems to me it only adds an extra layer of complexity and ambiguity.

Answer 1

You say the original purpose is lost. I ask, what is the original purpose?

Evidence indicates that native speakers remember phonemes, not phones. That is, an English-speaker's mental representation of "pie" is something like /paj/; the aspiration isn't "stored" as part of the word. Instead, English-speakers just know (subconsciously) to aspirate voiceless stops in stressed onsets, as long as they don't come after /s/. (This varies by dialect: I aspirate even after /s/, for example.)

Most language-learning programs are based on the same principle. There's an enormous amount of phonetic information in any word, so it's far easier to learn by "compressing" it: remembering a set of phonemes for each word, and a set of rules to turn those into a phonetic realization.

Answer 2

The distinction between allophone and phoneme is useful, because allophonic rules are ones that can actually be taught as general rules, whereas morphophonemic rules (neutralizing rules) generally are taught as "you just have to memorize it". However, actually teaching the technical terminology and giving phonemicization exercises is pretty useless.

If you present data in phonetic transcriptions, rather than phonemic transcriptions along side practice with contextual variants, you make it so much harder to learn the morphology and orthography of the language. The extent to which that actually matters depends on the language: aspiration alternations in English are not ubiquitous.

If you don't teach something like a rule of aspiration, then you will have to give phonetically transcribed data, which will confuse students into thinking that English is like Hindi; and you will have to explain why you get aspiration variation between appʰly vs. application. As for the symbol for the low back vowel, I suppose you do have to deal with Wikipedia which is likely to be a popular source of misinformation. There is no reason to transcribe that vowel as anything other than [a]. Most linguists don't truly understand the IPA, much less general language learners.

Answer 3

Broad transcription is meant to capture the difference between e.g. dead, deed, lad, lead "plumbum" and lead "guide, head" or whether ghoti is to be read as "fish". That can help a beginner, but no kind of transcription can help learning a perfect pronounciation. Have you taken a look at narrow transcription? It's a mess, and only useful for advanced linguists beginning to learn something new.

In short, native English listeners hardly even perceive the difference betwen e.g. /pʰɪt/ and /spɪn/, and if they do, they won't care much.

Otherwise, even if they noticed a foreign accent, the foreigner would need an introduction to phonetics, and a trainer to get rid of it. That would be too extensive to belong in a dictionary, or in an elementary class room.

A different dialect is noted differently in the respective dicts, which take a choice to note the allophone specifically, to present only one still mighty broad dialect--consider e.g. dance as the prime example for the difference between UK or US. You might ask why they don't note the aspirated labial plosive, too, but you'd have to make a case why they should. They have to limit the detail at some point. The prior answeres have already tried to point out that it is a reasonable decision.

Whether dictionaries noting narrow transcription of certain dialects exist and who should use them is a related, but different question. It rather seems that native speaker experience is required. Otherwise rule based descriptions are applied to broad description to yield a narrow dialect description, and the rules are inferred from example sets. The rules may differ depending on what is used as basis. So e.g. Spanish speakers necessarily build on Spanish. In principle, any learner tries to infer these rules, and only the important ones are noted in introductory classes.