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I've read more than once that the distinction between voiced and unvoiced plosives in English is more a distinction between aspirated and non-aspirated, and to a native speaker's ear a non-aspirated initial plosive (in a foreign language) sounds voiced (and also that non-aspirated and hence voiced initial plosives carry very little voice).

Assuming this is true, does this mean that in the minimal pairs "pear", "spare" and "bear/bare", to a native speaker's ear the last two are more similar with respect to the plosive than any to the first? And what about final plosives? Is, perceptually, the distincation between e.g. "had" and "hat", or "cab" and "cap" purely one of vowel-length, and would /h{:t/ be heard as "had", and /h{d/ as "hat"? I realize perception in these cases may be heavily poluted by spelling, but it'd be interesting to know nonetheless.


JAL

For me, pear/spare/bear are [p_heIr\], [speIr\], and [beIr]. If I don't deliberately try to hear the difference, the /p/ of "spare" certainly sounds much closer to the /b/ of "bear", at least to my ear, than the /p/ of "pear" does to "spare". I've also heard that English voiced plosives tend to be not fully voiced by some speakers, though I've never quite figured out what this means.

Also for me, "had" is [h{:d_}] and "hat" is [h{t_}]. The distinction is in both the voicing of the final stop as well as the length of the vowel, though the vowel length is allophonic and the voicing is phonemic. The final stops are both unreleased. As for whether [h{:t] would be heard as "had" to an English speaker, I think it depends on the person. I, for one, have no trouble hearing the distinction between unaspirated unvoiced stops and voiced stops, though others might. I know words have been borrowed into English in the past with voiced stops where the original has an unvoiced stop (e.g. "bishop" from Greek "episkopos"), but these could also be for different reasons.

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Ok, so that would more or less be in support of what I read.



I would guess that would sound about the same as the difference between [d] and [t_v]. It is supposedly audible.



What I was thinking is that the vowel length may become or have become phonemic instead of allophonic, as the distinction between voiced/unvoiced unaspirated final stops would diminish.



What I've read is that this is a common phenomenon with native English speakers. I myself have difficulty hearing the difference between aspirated and non-aspirated stops, as Dutch doesn't have aspirated stops, but does distinguish between voiced/unvoiced plosives.



Probably, as Dutch also has a "b" here. Also I'm not sure when in time the aspiration phenomenon entered English. Does anyone know whether it predates the invasion of the Norse? (At least Swedish has the same tules for aspiration of voiceless plosives, so I was thinking it could be a Viking thing.)


JAL

As someone who speaks an English dialect that has lost phonemic voicing of plosives I pronounce pear, spare, and bear as [pʰɛɹˠ], [spɛɹˠ], and [pɛɹˠ]. to

For me "cap" is [kʰɛəʔp] or [kʰɛəp’] while "cab" is [kʰɛˑəp].

Regarding codas: these are only unreleased, for me, in rapid speech.

Moreover, three things:
- it's possible that the weight of the distinction shifts in different situations (ie the voicing contrast may be more exagerated when aspiration is not available to help out)
- I think there are other elements of the consonant at work here - 'fortis'/'lenis' - but I don't know what they are. They feel different.
- There are also other effects on the vowel. To me, I think it's more about tone than about length: final voiced consonants produce low tone. Also, it feels as though vowels before final voiced are "held back" in some way - possibly this is some sort of tongue root phenomenon, or some back-of-the-throat minimal constriction? And I could be imagining things, but, off-hand, I think that there are some weird other things - for example, that /b/ has more of a rounding effect on preceding vowels than /p/ does.

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voice onset time (VOT). this is when the voice begins in relation to the plosive – if it's before the plosive (ie negative), the plosive is voiced, or more accurately prevoiced. if it's after the plosive (ie positive), then it's aspirated – that is, it has a period of voicelessness after it. this is all due to the fact that plosives constitute a closure in the vocal tract and can't be prolonged, so voicing of a stop technically is prevoicing because it comes before the stop.

ok so far?

http://www.psych.nyu.edu/pylkkanen/Neur ... gories.pdf
^ now this is almost word-for-word for one my recent psycholinguistics lectures (because the guy that did it taught my teacher) – essentially, they artificially altered the VOT of the syllable [ta], from 0 upwards, and asked participants (speakers of english) how they perceive it. and the result is universally that it's /da/ up until 20ms of aspiration, when there's a region from about 20-30ms where one can't tell which syllable it is, but after that it's /ta/. I also got played this during the lecture – it's a very obvious real effect. There's a nice little graph which looks like a weird Z but stretched. This is what that is referring to.

also i've had another teacher imply that we perceive the p in spare as p because of spelling. theoretically, you can also say that the contrast is neutralised after /s/.

the South Park "fish sticks" episode illustrates this perfectly

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I have [4_0] for word-final /d/, in addition to the vowel length things

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Sometime we need to do a full treatment of this topic and sticky the thing. I think most of the ingredients are present in this thread already: the excellent discussion of VOT, the mention of glottal reinforcement, releasement variations, and so forth. Only things left unmentioned so far are the nuances of vocal tract setting... I think.

Should that be my project this morning? Putting it all together into one long but good post?

I will be happy to edit any of this posting if anyone finds serious issues in it that need to be addressed. I'll treat it like a wiki article: always subject to revision and correction.

Aaaannnd away we go.

Phonetics of The English Stop Contrast

Some will tell you English stops are voiced and voiceless; others will tell you they're aspirated and unaspirated; still others almost seem to wave a wand by declaring them fortis and lenis - because nobody's entirely certain what that's supposed to mean, in phonetic terms. But for the moment I will use "fortis" and "lenis" as handy labels for the two stop series - /p t k/ and /b d g/ - but don't worry yet what they mean, for right now they're just names.

Never let anyone tell you that the contrast of English stops is made by a single easily described phonetic feature. Depending on dialect, in every phonetic environment there are multiple features involved in maintaining the contrast, and to understand what's really going on, we have to dissect things more closely than just saying "it's aspiration". At least five independent articulatory issues are involved, as described below.


ASPIRATION
What is aspiration? It's actually two things that, in English, work in tandem.

1. One is called Voice Onset Time - VOT for short. This refers to where, in a phonetic sequence, voicing begins. For fortis stops in some environments, it begins well after the stop is released. For lenis stops, it begins well before this... but the issue is messier here, and we will also have to ask "what is voicing?" (see #3). A fuller treatment of VOT is given by Finlay above; no need to repeat it.

2. The second element to aspiration is a widened vocal tract setting. There is a continuum of possible states of the glottis during speech; normal "voiceless" sounds are at one point along the continuum, with the glottis held somewhat open. But in aspiration the glottis is held further open still - about as open as it normally ever gets - which produces a subtle breathy, h-like phonation on whatever sounds you pronounce while the glottis is in this position. (And in fact English /h/ is just this: "aspirated" phonation alone, without any other articulatory component.)

English fortis stops always exhibit both components of aspiration before a stressed vowel, across all dialects, except that the aspiration is reduced or absent when the stop falls after an /s/. In this environment the distinction between the two stop series is essentially neutralized.


VOICING
3. What is voicing? It, too, turns out to be more complex than first meets the eye. Classically speaking, voicing (or "modal" voice) is defined as the vibration produced by the glottis when it is held in a certain position on its continuum, a tighter position than for voiceless sounds. However, the actual vibration is highly sensitive to disruption by certain factors. One of them is if there is too much air pressure in the oral cavity ahead of the glottis; this quickly dampens the glottal vibration to nothing. This is not much of an issue when pronouncing fricatives, nasals, vowels, and so forth, because air continues to escape the mouth during their articulation so oral pressure never gets too high to maintain the vibration. Stops are different. They completely close off the escape of air from the mouth for a short time during their articulation. During this time, oral air pressure rises as incoming air from the lungs builds up in the mouth, and this cuts off glottal vibration.

Many languages with voiced stops compensate by moving muscles in the mouth to increase the volume of the oral cavity so as to accomodate incoming air, thus preserving the glottal vibration; English does not do this. It permits the vibration to cease during the closure of a stop. So English lenis stops are "voiced" in the sense that they are always pronounced with the glottis held in the correct position for voicing, but not in the sense that the vibration actually continues during stop closure. The voicing vibration returns instantly upon the release of the stop, because the oral air pressure returns to normal at that time. This gives them a much earlier VOT than the fortis stops have.


SUPPORTING FEATURES
Various additional features help support the contrast in English stops. It is important to look at them because the VOT difference that arises from the voicing and aspiration systems does not operate in all phonetic environments. The VOT-based description works beautifully for stops located in the onset of a stressed syllable (except after /s/) - but before stressless syllables, and especially in codas, VOT is less important or simply absent as a factor.

4. Pre-lengthening. A vowel before a lenis stop is normally pronounced for a longer duration than it would otherwise be. This varies by dialect - in some it is a major feature distinguishing coda and post-stress lenis stops, and in others it is weakly present if at all. Another issue: in dialects with American t-flapping, the t/d distinction is mostly or fully neutralized in post-stress position. This is the ladder-latter merger. But in some varieties the two are not fully merged, despite t-flapping: they remain somewhat or fully distinguishable by the trace that /d/ leaves on vowel length. I'm uncertain exactly what regions this is true of; my impression is that the American Midwest tends to have this remaining length-based contrast more than other regions, but I have not studied the distribution.

5. Glottal reinforcement. To the best of my knowledge, across all dialects of English and in all postvocalic phonetic environments, fortis stops show some degree of "glottal reinforcement". This is not the same as "coarticulated with a glottal stop" as some people have put it, although it may amount to the same thing in some varieties. But in most varieties of English it consists of an incomplete glottal stricture that occurs immediately before the stop's primary closure. (This can also be described as creaky phonation type: fortis stops are slightly pre-creakyvoiced. It sounds nuts, but it's true.)

The net effect is that in many or most dialects, word-final plosives (which are usually unreleased) are told apart not by any of the voicing/aspiration type features, but instead by whether the stop is preceded by glottal stricture versus a longer vowel.


NOTES
- For some speakers there may be more features still that get involved; for instance see Salmoneus' post above. Pre-lengthening can involve changes to the tone or quality of the vowel, for one of the bigger points of variation. I have attempted only to describe what is true across most or all dialects (this is why I ignored British t-glottalization, for example).
- Do not rely too closely on the "puff of air" test for aspiration - it's cute and works some of the time, but is neither definitive of aspiration nor a reliable result of it.

Thanks everyone for your excellent posts! I couldn't wish for more thorough answers.


JAL

Multiple features – this is relevant, because it means that if you mishear one or two of them, you've got the others to back it up. Linguistic redundancy, shows up everywhere. Also note the McGurk effect (google it) – while not necessarily relevant to voicing, shows that when the visual and audial signals don't match up, the brain compensates for that too – ie, lipreading is also an example of an important feature.

also i'm linking your post in my sig radius, because it's relevant. could maybe do with some further reading for those interested, by the way. (And technically so that we can make sure you're not pulling it out your ass. I'm fairly sure you're not myself, but still. )

I agree it would benefit from a References section, for both reasons. The best reference I can give is Sounds of the World's Languages, that conlanger's bible of phonetics, by Ian Maddieson and Peter Ladefoged.

I pretty much rely on that book for any phonetics issues I want to know about. The aspiration and voicing sections are pretty much lifted straight from it (via memory) - I'll see if I can find actual page numbers later. The glottal reinforcement part mostly too. But the pre-lengthening section is mainly cobbled together out of general knowledge picked up from Teh Interwebs at various times, including the ZBB, so I'm hard-pressed to offer a citation for it.

I've heard that the lyrics "excuse me while I kiss the sky" by Hendrix were frequently misheard as "excuse me while I kiss this guy".

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Yeah, I've heard that too. Don't know whether it's true or an urban legend.

On a different note, can we nominate this thread for L&L Museum?


JAL

Sorry, just bumping. Got reminded of this thread since it's in finlay's sig, and it'd be a waste if pruned.


JAL

I remember an article in the New York Times about a fairly recent paper that showed something similar happens if the audial and tactile information are out of sync: e.g., one tends to hear /ta/ for /da/ (are slashes appropriate there?) if a air is blown onto one's hand. I assume the test subjects were native English speakers, but the article didn't specify. The actual paper is, I believe, here, but I can't get to anything other than the abstract.

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L&L Museum never gets pruned as far as I know. Does it??

No. This thread was still in L&L when jal bumped it. I just moved it, in response to his doing so.