English consonants

VOICING

• But this is not the only possibility for how the voicing and the beginning and end of the contact can be timed. When the stop consonant comes at the beginning of the word, we get a different effect when the voicing begins after the release of the contact; listen to the difference between the words bay and pay. Similarly at the end of the word, the effect is different if the voicing ends before the contact or roughly at the same time as the contact; compare add and at. The dimension that distinguishes these pairs of words from each other is called voicing. For the moment we will consider only two values for this dimension — voiced and voiceless — but, as we will see later, voicing is actually more complicated than this.

• Just as English has voiced stops at the bilabial, alveolar, and velar places of articulation, it also has voiceless stops at these places. The voiceless bilabial stop is illustrated at the beginning and end of the word pep. It is symbolized with /p/, so the pronunciation of pep is written /pεp/. The voiceless alveolar stop is illustrated at the beginning and end of the word tot. It is symbolized with /t/, so the pronunciation of tot is written /tͻt/. The voiceless velar stop is illustrated at the beginning and end of the word kick. It is symbolized with /k/, so the pronunciation of kick is written /kɪk/. There is also a voiceless stop with its place of articulation at the glottis; this is referred to as glottal place of articulation. For a glottal stop, the vocal cords are brought together, blocking the airstream as for other stops, and then released suddenly. The glottal stop may appear at the beginning of English words that begin with a vowel, and it appears in the middle of the word uh-oh. It is not normally considered an English phoneme, however, because it is not used to create new English words or to distinguish English words from one another. The symbol for a glottal stop in this book is /ʔ/ (the IPA symbol is like a question mark with no dot at the bottom), so the pronunciation of uh-oh is written /ʔ^ʔͻ/.