voiced/unvoiced - the real story?

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Lorikeet
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Post by Lorikeet » Thu Mar 13, 2008 10:07 pm

As a matter of fact, I have to explain to my students that sbin is not English spelling, whereas spin is. If I wanted to teach an English speaker to make an unaspirated /p/, I'd have them say something like spin, and then drop the /s/.

Woodcutter, I've had a lot of Chinese and Spanish speakers who can't make a /z/ sound. They aren't the only ones, but they do come to mind.

For a word like "gummed" I don't think the /d/ is heard at all before a word that begins with a consonant. "I gummed the food." for example. I''m sure I just drop the /d/ entirely, though in my mind I think I've said it, and of course I spell it correctly. On the other hand, before a word starting with a vowel, it's clear on the liaison. "I gummed an orange." for example.

I also think if we spelled the words "sdop" instead of "stop" we might wind up saying "zdop" instead.

woodcutter
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Post by woodcutter » Fri Mar 14, 2008 12:36 am

Well, maybe I talk funny, but to my mind if I say "speech" or "sbeech" "skill" or "sgill" etc it is more or less exactly the same, and so obviously easy to say. Especially if you say the words in the flow of a sentence, I think you will find that you are saying "sgill" etc. Anyway, whether you position your tongue for a g or a k, it actually doesn't matter. You don't have aspiration, so in fact you can say either and you can be assured no one will notice. (this latter point is in accord with what the thinker said).

If you did happen to voice early in stop it would probably sound like szdop, because the lengthy timing is the key feature, and wouldn't be hard to recognize.

I have taught Spanish speakers a fair bit, and I didn't notice a voicing problem, though I don't doubt you. You mean that they would say something like "The bee is bussing"? Anyway, my view is that voicing is an important secondary feature of certain sounds, (and thus the throat exercise for z/s might be worth doing) but is irrelevant when talking about stops, and is never important enough to cause difficulty if the speaker is accurate in all other ways.

blackmagicABC
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Post by blackmagicABC » Fri Mar 14, 2008 1:17 am

Firstly I agree completely that while we shouldn't change the spelling, we should change the way the phonics is written purely because it is clearer for word like stop or skill.
Ironically, many foreign teachers whom I have met here in Taiwan is unaware of this and only realize the say "sdop" if you let them record themselves and then listen to it.
Again, I think that is the kind of thing that happens naturally and shouldn't be forced.

woodcutter
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Post by woodcutter » Fri Mar 14, 2008 3:18 am

I'm also not in favour of spelling reform, only of greater accuracy in phonetic spelling.

You can hardly blame people for doing it wrongly (as I see it) - in my experience it is written "wrongly" at CELTA, ESL textbook and university level, and merely discussed in advanced phonetics classes.

lolwhites
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Post by lolwhites » Sat Mar 15, 2008 6:22 pm

My point about aspiration and voiceless consonants was that the sounds are allophones; /p/, /t/ and /k/ are realised at the surface in different ways depending on the phonological environment. Their voiced equivalents are still different, though. If you recorded someone uttering the words beach, d1ck and gill and played them alongside digitally edited speech, stick and skill minus s, you'd hear a difference.

I'm not sure it's something you can, or should, teach though, unless your students are language specialists trying to study the phonological system of English. A dictionary transcription that captured every detail à la IPA would probably be too much information for most students.

Of course, we can still have fun discussing it ourselves!

thethinker
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Post by thethinker » Sun Mar 16, 2008 4:23 pm

I'm also not in favour of spelling reform, only of greater accuracy in phonetic spelling
But what do you mean by 'phonetic spelling'? Phonetic transcriptions? Phonemic transcriptions? If you're talking about the sort that you find in dictionaries, they're phonemic transcriptions (even if sometimes they claim to be otherwise) - but it's perfectly accurate to write /stIk/ for 'stick' in a phonemic transcription, as although the /t/ may be unvoiced it is still the /t/ phoneme. Phonetic transcriptions are completely unsuited to teaching, as they are far too complex.

lolwhites
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Post by lolwhites » Sun Mar 16, 2008 7:27 pm

What you get in a dictionary can be a kind of hybrid between the phonetic and the phonemic. For example, I've often seen the /r/ in car presented as a kind of diacritic to reflect the fact that many British English speakers don't pronounce it unless followed by a vowel.

If you were to put in all the little symbols to reflect what happens at the phonetic level you'd drive the average student to distraction. Does anyone seriously teach their students that vowels are longer before voiced sounds, for example?

woodcutter
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Post by woodcutter » Mon Mar 17, 2008 12:34 am

I'm talking about phonemic transcriptions (which are after all most commonly called phonetic transcriptions by most people, confusingly).

As we have discussed, take away the S in speech and people hear a B sound. This sound is thus an allophone of B, not of P, and should be written accordingly. Sounds vary slightly all the time, but the crucial thing in a phonemic system is what people actually think they hear. (when they listen, not when they just thoughtlessly rely on the spelling)

thethinker
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Post by thethinker » Mon Mar 17, 2008 9:24 am

As we have discussed, take away the S in speech and people hear a B sound. This sound is thus an allophone of B, not of P, and should be written accordingly.
But leave the /s/ sound there and people (and I'm talking about native speakers) hear a /p/ sound! The unaspirated /p/ is definitely not an allophone of /b/ (just as the /p/ in 'up' is still a /p/ phoneme, although it's not aspirated). I'm sorry - I don't want to sound rude but I don't think you've exactly grasped the difference between a phoneme and an allophone, and between phonetic and a phonemic transcription. Each phoneme that we perceive as speakers of a language can have a number of different pronunciations, and these are called allophones. The phoneme /p/, which we have been talking about, can be aspirated or unaspirated, and these are two allophones of the phoneme /p/. However, aspirated or unaspirated, we're still talking about the same phoneme here, and it is still perceived as being one sound.

A phonemic transcription is based on the phonemes of a language. Within a phoneme there may well be a number of allophones, but since on a language level our brains perceive all those slightly different sounds as being basically the same sound, a phonemic transcription would never include allophones (since different allophones are not something that people perceive without special techniques, like holding of a piece of paper in front of your mouth to test for aspiration, or digitally removing the /s/ from 'speech' to see how the /p/ phoneme is actually realised). The aim of a phonemic transcription is to provide a description of how a word is produced/perceived on a phonological level. As soon as your start including allophones then you are creating a phonetic transcription.

But even if you wanted to provide a kind of hybrid phonetic/phonemic transcription of 'speech', I don't see why you would want to start it as /sb.../. All that would be necessary would be to not include the small 'h' which is added to indicate aspiration, and would be included in the 'p' in 'peach'. As someone said, there is still a difference between the /p/ in 'speech' and the /b/ in 'beach', even if the /p/ in 'speech' is closer to the /b/ in 'beach' than the /p/ in 'peach' is. If you really want to be able to cover this difference in class then to me the logical approach would be to tell Ss the situations when a /p/ is not aspirated in English. That is basically the understanding that we as native speakers have - we know when to pronounce a /p/ sound without aspiration (e.g. after /s/), and we know to perceive an unaspirated /p/ sound as a /p/ when it occurs after a /s/ sound. But the crucial thing in phonemic theory is that we still perceive these non-aspirated alternatives as a /p/ phoneme.

In my experience it's only in ELT that phonemic transcriptions are often called phonetic transcriptions, and I think it's quite embarrassing really, as the differences between the two are quite crucial.

woodcutter
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Post by woodcutter » Tue Mar 18, 2008 12:29 am

I agree with most of that but the sound in "speech" is not like P. It is missing aspiration, and what is more aspiration has to be produced by tensing up the mouth, so the there will be a noticable all round physical difference. The position/tensing of mouth tongue etc is a fluid thing, and however many squiggles you have you can't perfectly describe it. The sound is also perhaps unlike B, however it is similar enough to B to sound like a B, and if you inserted an exact regular initial position B in that position it would go unnoticed. Put in a regular P and it sounds weird.

When identifying an allophone we must rely on what people recognize. The "l"s in lion and bell are different, but in our phonemic system they both fall under "l", because people say they hear "l".

The problem seems to be that you say that people hear a "p" in "speech" when the s is present. They do not. They assume a p sound, and since our spelling has no sb combinations, never have to reflect on it.

thethinker
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Post by thethinker » Tue Mar 18, 2008 1:11 pm

I think it depends on who the 'people' are that you are talking about, when you say that we must rely on what 'people' recognise, and that 'people' do not hear a /p/ sound in 'speech'. If you're talking about native speakers, how can you demonstrate that they hear a /b/ sound in 'speech'? If you are right that for some reason 'people' are completely mistaken when they say they hear a /p/ (which I find extremely unlikely), and that they only say this because of the spelling, then we would need to make up some non-existent words like 'spull', 'spad' and so on, play them to native speakers, and ask them what the first two sounds are. I doubt most people would actually be aware that s+b combinations aren't allowed at the beginning of a word in English, so I think we could rely on their responses, and I would be willing to bet that they would say the second sound is a /p/ sound. You might get different answers from non-native speakers, and that might tell you something about how the pronunciation of stop sounds should be taught, but it would not invalidate the answers of the native speakers.

I don't really understand why you are so convinced that the spelling is wrong, anyway. Yes, there are irregularities with English spelling, but generally they are confined to vowels and certain other long combinations of vowels and consonants (e.g. -ough). I think that with individual consonants or consonant clusters English spelling is generally completely regular.

One more small point. Don't focus on the fact that the /p/ is 'missing' aspiration in 'speech'. It just isn't aspirated - there's nothing 'missing'. You seem to think that an aspirated /p/ sound is the 'standard' pronunciation of the /p/ phoneme, but in fact it's just an allophone - both aspirated and unaspirated /p/ sounds are allophones of the /p/ consonant, but one is not derived from the other or somehow 'missing' something of what a /p/ sound should be. Using your logic I could take the argument in the other direction and say that because /p/ is aspirated in 'peach' it's not really a /p/ sound because /p/ sounds generally don't have aspiration, so in fact it's a completely different phoneme and not a /p/. Or I could use your original argument and say that the /p/ in 'up' is actually a /b/ because it's not aspirated either. But those two things are no more true than it is true that just because the /p/ isn't aspirated in 'speech' that it's not a /p/. It is a /p/. It's just not aspirated.
Last edited by thethinker on Tue Mar 18, 2008 2:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

thethinker
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Post by thethinker » Tue Mar 18, 2008 1:20 pm

You might also be interested in this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics

lolwhites
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Post by lolwhites » Tue Mar 18, 2008 7:12 pm

The existence of allophones raises the question of "what's the underlying form?". Is it aspirated /p/ or unaspirated? That's why during the final year of my Linguistics degree, the phonetics lecturers started calling into question whether phonemes actually existed, or whether it's more accurate to talk about features like voicing, aspriration, labialisation and so on being turned on and off.

For example, take the minimal pair writer/rider. British English speakers would think of the distinguishing feature as being t or d. However, in American English, voiceless sounds are voiced between vowels (an alternative analysis is that the voicing isn't "switched off"), so the middle consonant is realised as /d/ both times. Nevertheless, the two words don't sound the same in AE: the /ai/ in rider is longer than writer because vowels are longer before voiced sounds. Native speakers are rarely aware of this until it's pointed out to them.

In other words, segmenting words into phonemes may be a useful approximation, but it seems that what happens at the surface is far more messy than anything a learner's book on pronunciation will tell you.

woodcutter
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Post by woodcutter » Wed Mar 19, 2008 12:39 am

But my initial argument is that d isn't voiced, it just lacks aspiration, so I'd like to find a rephrasing of lol's argument! (and anyway, since a U.S medial t is "voiced" you would have to explain the vowel length depending on the theoretical underlying form and not the actual "voicing" )

As to the thinkers experiment, I'd like to take up the challenge, but we have to even things up. People will equate a nonsense word such as "spug" with the closest word they know. That might be "spud" (a British potato!) and thus they will claim a "p" sound.

How about if we introduce it like this though? "On the planet Blargzaz, are the towns of Sbeg, Sboodle and Sbroggin". We show these spellings to our subjects. "There is also a town called 'spambarg'". We do not show this spelling, and we ask our subjects which sound they hear after the s.

Actually if I try and say sboodle/spoodle, it is in fact perhaps the length of the s which would distinguish most. So if you are going to say that medial "voiced" sounds are sounds with longish sounds in front, instead of fiddling with your buzzy throat, then you'll have a point. However I suggest that "voicing" is thus a confusing term and should be referred to as "prior lengthening"! That is perhaps the main problem with phonemics - timing is so crucial and yet phonemics does not really deal with time very much.

By the way, I guess the reason that the sounds are shorter before aspirated consonants is that we tense up our mouths to make the explosion and cut off the previous sound while doing that. In the P in spam we possibly (and only sometimes, I would hazard) tense up our mouths and then do not release the explosion, so that the P will sound tenser than a regular B. Still - nothing to do with voicing.

thethinker
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Post by thethinker » Wed Mar 19, 2008 10:54 am

It's a fair point Woodcutter, but I think your proposed test isn't fair. As soon as you talk about alien planets and so on, you're basically suggesting a foreign language with different rules. In tests like these you have to say or pretend that these words are still English words.

I was looking at this in Roach today, and he also mentions a possible spelling influence into why 'speech is transcribed' 'sp ...'. But I would ask why people decided to spell it like that to start with. Yes, English spelling is not always accurate. But the inaccuracies can be accounted for, e.g. by the fact that our sound system has changed but our writing system not. But I have never heard it suggested that at one point the /p/ in 'speech' was aspirated, so it's not unreasonable to assume that when people started writing the word, they based the spelling on the sounds (i.e. phonemes) that they as native speakers perceived, independent on any spelling influence.

Phonemic theory is indeed a bit problematic at times. I wonder what your phonology lecturers had to say about the (non-) existence of phonemes though lolwhites. In my degree I didn't take phonetics after the first year but I carried on with phonology, and I don't remember anyone actually suggesting phonemes don't exist.

I think generative phonology can comfortably explain how the second sound in 'speech' has as many features of a /b/ sound as it does of a /p/ sound but is still a /p/ phoneme.

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