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Why does aspiration change meaning in some languages but not usually in English?

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Diagram of a human head in profile showing the location of vocal organs and possible places of articulation for speech sounds, with labels for lips, teeth, tongue, palate, uvula, pharynx, and vocal cords, and numbered regions corresponding to types of articulation such as bilabial, alveolar, and velar.
pronunciation Diagram depicting the location of human vocal organs and possible places of articulation used for speech.

In linguistics, the difference between whether aspiration changes the meaning of a word depends on whether the aspirated and unaspirated sounds are classified as separate phonemes or merely as allophones of the same phoneme.51

In English, aspiration is generally non-phonemic. For example, the aspirated [pʰ] (as in "pin") and the unaspirated [p] (as in "spin") are contextually determined variants of the same phoneme /p/. Because these sounds are in complementary distribution—meaning they never appear in the exact same phonetic environment to distinguish two different words—English speakers perceive them as the same sound.213

Conversely, in languages like Thai or Hindi, aspirated and unaspirated sounds can appear in the same context to distinguish words, making them separate phonemes. In these languages, the presence or absence of that "puff of air" is a functional, meaning-changing feature. Therefore, while aspiration is a physical reality in many languages, it only changes meaning when a language uses that specific phonetic difference to create minimal pairs that contrast in the lexicon.4512