Voice (phonetics) - English Examples

English Examples

The distinction between the articulatory use of voice and the phonological use rests on the distinction between phone (represented between square brackets) and phoneme (represented between slashes). The difference is best illustrated by a rough example. The English word nods is made up of a sequence of phonemes, represented symbolically as /nɒdz/, or the sequence of /n/, /ɒ/, /d/, and /z/. Each of these symbols is an abstract representation of a phoneme. This awareness is an inherent part of speakers' mental grammar that allows them to recognize words.

However, phonemes are not themselves sounds. Rather, phonemes are, in a sense, converted to phones before being spoken. The /z/ phoneme, for instance, can actually be pronounced as either the phone or the phone because /z/ is frequently devoiced in fluent speech, especially at the end of an utterance. The sequence of phones for nods might be transcribed as or, depending on the presence or strength of this devoicing. While the phone has articulatory voicing, the phone does not.

What complicates the matter is that, for English, consonant phonemes are classified as either voiced or voiceless even though this is not the primary distinctive feature between them. Still, the classification is used as a stand-in for phonological processes, such as vowel lengthening that occurs before voiced consonants but not before unvoiced consonants or vowel quality changes (i.e. the sound of the vowel) in some dialects of English that occur before unvoiced but not voiced consonants. These processes allow English speakers to continue to perceive difference between voiced and voiceless consonants when the devoicing of the former would otherwise make them sound identical to the latter.

English has four pairs of fricative phonemes which can be divided into a table by place of articulation and voicing. The voiced fricatives can readily be felt to have voicing throughout the duration of the phone, especially when occurring between vowels.

However, in the class of consonants called stops, such as /p, t, k, b, d, ɡ/, the contrast is more complicated for English. The "voiced" sounds do not typically feature articulatory voicing throughout the sound. The difference between the unvoiced stop phonemes and the voiced stop phonemes is not just a matter of whether articulatory voicing is present or not. Rather, it includes when voicing starts (if at all), the presence of aspiration (airflow burst following the release of the closure), the duration of the closure and aspiration.

English voiceless stops are generally aspirated at the beginning of a stressed syllable while, in the same context, their voiced counterparts are only voiced partway through. In more narrow phonetic transcription, these the voiced symbols are may be used only to represent the presence of articulatory voicing while aspiration is represented with a superscript h.

When these consonants come at the end of a syllable, however, what distinguishes them is quite different; voiceless phonemes are typically unaspirated, glottalized and the closure itself may not even be released, making it sometimes difficult to hear the difference between, for example, light and like. However, auditory cues remain to distinguish between voiced and voiceless sounds, such as what has been described above, e.g. the length of the preceding vowel.

Other English sounds, the vowels and sonorants, are normally fully voiced. However, they may be devoiced in certain positions, especially after aspirated consonants, as in Copernicus, tree, and play, where the voicing is delayed to the extent of missing the sonorant or vowel altogether.