or marker. A minimal pair may exist in the signed language if the basic sign stays the same, but one of the parameters changes.

However, the absence of minimal pairs for a given pair of phones does not always mean that they belong to the same phoneme: they may be so dissimilar phonetically that it is unlikely for speakers to perceive them as the same sound. For example, English has no minimal pair for the sounds (as in hat) and (as in bang), and the fact that they can be shown to be in complementary distribution