  The term 'phoneme' lies at the heart of speech science and technology, and
yet it is not clear that the research community fully appreciates its meaning
and implications. In particular, it is suspected that many researchers use the
term in a casual sense to refer to the sounds of speech, rather than as a well
defined abstract concept. If true, this means that some sections of the
community may be missing an opportunity to understand and exploit the
implications of this important psychological phenomenon. Here we review the
correct meaning of the term 'phoneme' and report the results of an
investigation into its use/misuse in the accepted papers at INTERSPEECH-2018.
It is confirmed that a significant proportion of the community (i) may not be
aware of the critical difference between `phonetic' and 'phonemic' levels of
description, (ii) may not fully understand the significance of 'phonemic
contrast', and as a consequence, (iii) consistently misuse the term 'phoneme'.
These findings are discussed, and recommendations are made as to how this
situation might be mitigated.
