Phonemics
The study of the psychophonic (language-dependent) parts of speech. How we interpret and compensate for sound quality.
Phonemic transcriptions are written in IPA with / surrounding the transcription (eg. \(/fasI/\)). These transcriptions don't represent actual sounds, but the ideal representation of them. In [see page 6, practice] there're several different ways to sound the same phonetic sequence.
Phonemic Contrast
Early phoneticians realised that acoustically distinct speech sounds were only percieved as different if they signalled the difference between one word and another. I.E. They were contrastive.
In order to prove that a phonetic-distinction is contrastive we must find two words which possess a minimal-pair.
Perception
Some speakers find it extremely difficult to pronounce certain phonemes because they can't distinguish between them. Japanese speakers [see page 5, struggle ]to pronounce [r] and [l] because no word in the japanese language use these phonenes, so they're both pronounced as their allophene [l].