The phonetic level is related to the surface level form, while the phonemic level is related to:

• A. speech sounds
• B. the phonemic inventory
• C. distinctive features
• D. the underlying form

Answer: (D)

The phonemic level deals with abstract units that distinguish meaning—the underlying form that phonology uses to encode words. Phonetics handles surface realization, the actual speech sounds you hear. The underlying form is what phonology operates on to generate the various surface realizations (allophones) through rules. For example, the English /t/ can surface as [tʰ] or [t] depending on context, but the underlying form remains the same. So the phonemic level is tied to the underlying form rather than the concrete sounds, the inventory of phonemes, or the feature details of sounds.