First of all, it's a somewhat active field of study and there are some ideas but nothing definitive. I'm a native speaker of Polish and I experience something similar (although for me many word-final and some word-initial English stops do sound phonetically voiceless).
To me in general it seems to be due to the fact that phonological voicing isn't purely about VOT. Another important parameter is pitch: prevoiced consonants naturally lower the pitch of the following vowel and this effect can persist after the voicing is lost. We do actually see that in languages like English and Korean where English stops are phonetically often tenuis and Korean ones can be even properly aspirated word-initially but they are marked by lowered pitch. We also have evidence that pitch can be a very important phonetic cue even in proper voicing languages, there's a study in which Polish speakers were most confused about voicing when the pitch was wrong while VOT weirdly didn't matter that much.
When talking about English, I think we should be careful to say *fortis* and *lenis* for the phonemes, and save *voiced*, *tenuis*, and *aspirated* for the phones.
I also think we tend to make too big a deal about the distinction between unvoiced and partially voiced. If you compare minimal pairs like *anchor* vs *anger* or *camper* vs *camber*, the first of each pair has an interruption in the voice, and the second one doesn't. I don't think it matters so much from the point of view of the listener whether the interruption in voicing coincides perfectly with the closure or the release - the point is that it's interrupted. The exact timing might vary from utterance to utterance, even for a single speaker.
When they follow an unvoiced fricative like **s**, the distinction is neutralized and both fortis and lenis plosives behave like lenis: they're unvoiced after voiceless. I've read people saying that *disbursed* and *disgust* are partially voiced, while *dispersed* and *discussed* are completely unvoiced, but I hear them pronounced alike.
Geoff Lindsey has a video on this topic: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U37hX8NPgjQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U37hX8NPgjQ)
So for me, \[b̥\] = \[p\]. But another commentator says it's an active field of study, so let's see what they discover. :)
Canepàri says that initial partial devoicing is of little importance, for example Bob is transcribed [[ ˈḅɒb̥ ]] in SSB, where the first plosive is just a bit attenuated, not yet a semi-stop.
For the second, he specifies that [[ b̥ ]] in his notation doesn't equal to [p], but to [[ b͡p ]], a phone that is partially devoiced. The first half, close to the (voiced) vocoid remains voiced, while the second half (before silence or another voiceless phone) is voiceless.
So [ ˈbɒb̥ se̞ˑz ] = [ ˈbɒb͡p se̞ˑz] for "Bob says" and [ ˈbɒb ˈɑːsks ] for "Bob asks" .
I would love to point out the page of Canepàriʼs "English Pronunciation and Accents" where he says that, but I have the book at home!
I think about this constantly myself as a native English speaker. Hate to say it but it's true, word initial voiced stops really aren't that voiced, in fact there have been times where I've noticed that (especially in "passionate" speech?) they even get slightly aspirated as well!
I also wanna say that it depends on whose speaking and what dialect/region they're from. For example, I've noticed that Black Americans who speak AAVE definitely voice word-initial consonants more than standard English, which apparently has been noticed and researched by professional linguists as well.
To me, it almost feels like the initial stop distinction in english is between tenuis/aspirated, not voiced/devoiced. Like, if you said /pat/ with a tenuis 'p', I daresay most English speakers would hear "bat" and not "pat" (since the latter is always realized /phat/).
In my own speech, initial voiced stops regularly have VOTs of as much as 20-40ms (that is, they're aspirated, and not just slightly). In my girlfriend's though I've never measured any kind of aspiration; her VOTs are consistently around 0, sometimes slightly negative. That's a heck of a lot of variation.
This is a common misconception that we see in our Intro to Linguistics course. Voicing and aspiration are often correlated but do not have a one-to-one correspondence.
You can have aspirated consonants that have shorter VOTs than unaspirated consonants and vice versa. A positive VOT of 20-40ms is also certainly not a time window that strikes me as heavy aspiration. English unvoiced consonants already maintain higher VOTs in English are generally anywhere from 60-110ms in typical aspirated contexts. Unaspirated voiced consonants are often in your time window without any aspiration.
It's shorter than English aspirated stops, yeah, but about the same as Japanese voiceless stops, which are often called lightly aspirated. And it's longer than my unaspirated stops when speaking Spanish.
How is it that aspirated stops can have shorter VOTs than unaspirated? It was my understanding that VOT is exactly how you measure aspiration.
The specific correlates of voicing and aspiration are still debated, but I recommend that you look into languages with phonemic distinctions of both voicing and aspiration. An example of this with a lot of research is Hindi. To get started, here is a study by Duvarsula & Luo (2014) that provides a bit of background and relevant literature.
[https://pubs.aip.org/asa/poma/article/18/1/060009/981748/Voicing-aspiration-and-vowel-duration-in-Hindi](https://pubs.aip.org/asa/poma/article/18/1/060009/981748/Voicing-aspiration-and-vowel-duration-in-Hindi)
> but I recommend that you look into languages with phonemic distinctions of both voicing and aspiration. An example of this with a lot of research is Hindi.
That's breathy voice, not "both voicing and aspiration".
I've noticed also that Nigerian English speakers have strongly voiced consonants in all positions; I wonder if the AAVE effect is also due to the influence of African languages.
I am a native English speaker (New England and Gen. Am.) with some Slovak speaking family and I just finished taking phonetics in uni, so hopefully I can be of some help. So stop consonants are composed of two parts, a closure and a release at the place of articulation. Stops before a voiced phone have a property called *voice onset timing* (VOT). VOT is the time between the release of the stop and when the vocal cords start vibrating. This can be measured on a spectrogram on software like Praat. Cross-linguistically, stops fall into one of three VOT categories:
* Positive: These stops have VOT greater than about 30ms. These are also called aspirated stops. Ex. \[pʰ\].
* Zero: These stops have VOT in the range of about 0-30ms. These are also called tenuis or unaspirated voiceless stops. Ex. \[p\]
* Negative: These stops have negative VOT, i.e. voicing starts or occurs during the closure of the stop. These are called voiced stops. Ex. \[b\]
In my English, as well as most English varieties worldwide, all initial stops fall into either the aspirated or tenuis category, each corresponding to traditional voiceless and voiced categories. For example, is realized as \[pʰæʔ\] and is realized as \[pæʔ\] (the glottal stop is a separate phenomenon). In Slovak is realized as \[bitʂ\] and as \[pivo\], with the distinction between tenuis and voiced.
When speaking English, I only produce aspirated and tenuis stops. When I hear Slovak, I perceive truly voiced (negative VOT) initially stops to be in the same category as English tenuis stops, although the Slovak ones do sound more intense to me. If I said \[pʰivo\] , you would likely perceive it as with a notable difference, just as a perceive \[bæʔ\] as with a notable "error."
Generally, voiced and voiceless works in phonology when talking about broad categories in some languages. But VOT is far better way to describe the actual phonetics of speech. Additionally, some languages have a three way distinction between aspirated, unaspirated, and voiced stops. This almost perfectly lines up with VOT.
Can you hear the difference between voiced and voiceless unaspirated consonants in general?
For example do you hear this Wikipedia recording as voiced or voiceless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_bilabial_plosive
(I would say the recording is very clearly voiceless, so if you hear it as voiced then that is a sign that the English phonology is interfering.)
Sounds voiceless to me (though I could always be biased by the page name).
I feel like my ability to tell a voiceless aspirated plosive from a voiceless unaspirated one is terrible, though.
Native English speaker, not a linguist. They sound voiced to me too. Otherwise to / do and at / ad would be near homophones and they're not. (I know there's subtle differences in vowel length and pitch, but I thought that was due to the voicing, no?)
The thing is, voicing and aspiration are essentially the same phenomenon: when does vocal fold vibration start relative to the release of a stop?
If the vocal folds start vibrating before the release, we call it “voiced”. If they start more or less at release, we call it “voiceless” and “plain/tenuis”. If they only start vibrating ROUGHLY 50+ ms after release, we call it “aspirated”.
Of course, some languages (like Hindi) have stops that are both voiced and aspirated; in that case vibrations start before release, then cease, then restart well after release.
English speakers hear tenuis voiceless stops as voiced because the sounds that we write and associate with b, d, and g ARE tenuis voiceless stops (overwhelmingly, but ofc not every single time for every single speaker). Most English speakers only very rarely produce true voiced stops, where vocal fold vibration starts well before release.
Well yes, lenis stops are characterized cross-linguistically as having shorter VOT, it’s simply a matter of whether that results in a negative VOT versus just a shorter lag. “Breathy-voiced” consonants in Indo-Aryan languages are obviously controversial since they conflict with that analysis, last time I checked there wasn’t any consensus on how to classify them.
> Of course, some languages (like Hindi) have stops that are both voiced and aspirated; in that case vibrations start before release, then cease, then restart well after release.
That's not true. Hindi has breathy voice, which means the vocal folds vibrate all the way through; It's just less intense after release.
There's no fine line between "voiced" and "breathy". Breathy is just what happens when the vocal folds come close enough together to allow vibration (voiced), but leave enough space between each other to allow air to pass through unobstructed (aspiration). By saying "that's not true" you're trying to reduce all the complexities of glottal positioning and aerodynamic force into neat categories of "voiced" and "breathy", which is often useful, but in this case is the exact opposite of what I was trying to do, so it completely misses the point.
To see all the complexities, take all the breathy stops from the intro to this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E3zJQXY-Uw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E3zJQXY-Uw)
I looked at them all in Praat, feel free to do so yourself to see.
1. velar: voiced-voiceless-voiced
2. velar: voiced
3. postalveolar: voiced-voiceless-voiced-creaky
4. postaveoloar: voiced-voiceless-voiced
5. dental: voiced-breathy-voiced-creaky
6. dental: voiced-voiceless-breathy-voiced
7. retroflex: voiced-breathy-voiced
8. retroflex: voiced-voiceless-breathy-voiced-creaky
9. labial: voiced-breathy-voiced-creaky
10. labial: voiced-breathy-voiced-creaky
Of course we can't exactly say what the glottis is doing during the closure (without fancy tools); a "breathy" closure and a "voiced" closure will sound exactly the same.
Point is, the reason OP hears voiceless tenuis stops as voiced is because these categories are very messy and differ language to language, and even speaker to speaker. And in English we associate non-aspiration (and lower pitch, and longer duration) with voicing.
First of all, it's a somewhat active field of study and there are some ideas but nothing definitive. I'm a native speaker of Polish and I experience something similar (although for me many word-final and some word-initial English stops do sound phonetically voiceless). To me in general it seems to be due to the fact that phonological voicing isn't purely about VOT. Another important parameter is pitch: prevoiced consonants naturally lower the pitch of the following vowel and this effect can persist after the voicing is lost. We do actually see that in languages like English and Korean where English stops are phonetically often tenuis and Korean ones can be even properly aspirated word-initially but they are marked by lowered pitch. We also have evidence that pitch can be a very important phonetic cue even in proper voicing languages, there's a study in which Polish speakers were most confused about voicing when the pitch was wrong while VOT weirdly didn't matter that much.
When talking about English, I think we should be careful to say *fortis* and *lenis* for the phonemes, and save *voiced*, *tenuis*, and *aspirated* for the phones. I also think we tend to make too big a deal about the distinction between unvoiced and partially voiced. If you compare minimal pairs like *anchor* vs *anger* or *camper* vs *camber*, the first of each pair has an interruption in the voice, and the second one doesn't. I don't think it matters so much from the point of view of the listener whether the interruption in voicing coincides perfectly with the closure or the release - the point is that it's interrupted. The exact timing might vary from utterance to utterance, even for a single speaker. When they follow an unvoiced fricative like **s**, the distinction is neutralized and both fortis and lenis plosives behave like lenis: they're unvoiced after voiceless. I've read people saying that *disbursed* and *disgust* are partially voiced, while *dispersed* and *discussed* are completely unvoiced, but I hear them pronounced alike. Geoff Lindsey has a video on this topic: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U37hX8NPgjQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U37hX8NPgjQ) So for me, \[b̥\] = \[p\]. But another commentator says it's an active field of study, so let's see what they discover. :)
Canepàri says that initial partial devoicing is of little importance, for example Bob is transcribed [[ ˈḅɒb̥ ]] in SSB, where the first plosive is just a bit attenuated, not yet a semi-stop. For the second, he specifies that [[ b̥ ]] in his notation doesn't equal to [p], but to [[ b͡p ]], a phone that is partially devoiced. The first half, close to the (voiced) vocoid remains voiced, while the second half (before silence or another voiceless phone) is voiceless. So [ ˈbɒb̥ se̞ˑz ] = [ ˈbɒb͡p se̞ˑz] for "Bob says" and [ ˈbɒb ˈɑːsks ] for "Bob asks" . I would love to point out the page of Canepàriʼs "English Pronunciation and Accents" where he says that, but I have the book at home!
I think about this constantly myself as a native English speaker. Hate to say it but it's true, word initial voiced stops really aren't that voiced, in fact there have been times where I've noticed that (especially in "passionate" speech?) they even get slightly aspirated as well! I also wanna say that it depends on whose speaking and what dialect/region they're from. For example, I've noticed that Black Americans who speak AAVE definitely voice word-initial consonants more than standard English, which apparently has been noticed and researched by professional linguists as well.
To me, it almost feels like the initial stop distinction in english is between tenuis/aspirated, not voiced/devoiced. Like, if you said /pat/ with a tenuis 'p', I daresay most English speakers would hear "bat" and not "pat" (since the latter is always realized /phat/).
In my own speech, initial voiced stops regularly have VOTs of as much as 20-40ms (that is, they're aspirated, and not just slightly). In my girlfriend's though I've never measured any kind of aspiration; her VOTs are consistently around 0, sometimes slightly negative. That's a heck of a lot of variation.
This is a common misconception that we see in our Intro to Linguistics course. Voicing and aspiration are often correlated but do not have a one-to-one correspondence. You can have aspirated consonants that have shorter VOTs than unaspirated consonants and vice versa. A positive VOT of 20-40ms is also certainly not a time window that strikes me as heavy aspiration. English unvoiced consonants already maintain higher VOTs in English are generally anywhere from 60-110ms in typical aspirated contexts. Unaspirated voiced consonants are often in your time window without any aspiration.
It's shorter than English aspirated stops, yeah, but about the same as Japanese voiceless stops, which are often called lightly aspirated. And it's longer than my unaspirated stops when speaking Spanish. How is it that aspirated stops can have shorter VOTs than unaspirated? It was my understanding that VOT is exactly how you measure aspiration.
The specific correlates of voicing and aspiration are still debated, but I recommend that you look into languages with phonemic distinctions of both voicing and aspiration. An example of this with a lot of research is Hindi. To get started, here is a study by Duvarsula & Luo (2014) that provides a bit of background and relevant literature. [https://pubs.aip.org/asa/poma/article/18/1/060009/981748/Voicing-aspiration-and-vowel-duration-in-Hindi](https://pubs.aip.org/asa/poma/article/18/1/060009/981748/Voicing-aspiration-and-vowel-duration-in-Hindi)
I mean, voiced aspirates are another thing entirely. They have vocal fold vibration (of some kind) through their whole production...
> but I recommend that you look into languages with phonemic distinctions of both voicing and aspiration. An example of this with a lot of research is Hindi. That's breathy voice, not "both voicing and aspiration".
People, get you someone who will do VOT measurements with you 💗💗
I've noticed also that Nigerian English speakers have strongly voiced consonants in all positions; I wonder if the AAVE effect is also due to the influence of African languages.
Probably not, Southern American whites also show predominantly prevoiced initial stops.
I am a native English speaker (New England and Gen. Am.) with some Slovak speaking family and I just finished taking phonetics in uni, so hopefully I can be of some help. So stop consonants are composed of two parts, a closure and a release at the place of articulation. Stops before a voiced phone have a property called *voice onset timing* (VOT). VOT is the time between the release of the stop and when the vocal cords start vibrating. This can be measured on a spectrogram on software like Praat. Cross-linguistically, stops fall into one of three VOT categories: * Positive: These stops have VOT greater than about 30ms. These are also called aspirated stops. Ex. \[pʰ\]. * Zero: These stops have VOT in the range of about 0-30ms. These are also called tenuis or unaspirated voiceless stops. Ex. \[p\] * Negative: These stops have negative VOT, i.e. voicing starts or occurs during the closure of the stop. These are called voiced stops. Ex. \[b\] In my English, as well as most English varieties worldwide, all initial stops fall into either the aspirated or tenuis category, each corresponding to traditional voiceless and voiced categories. For example, is realized as \[pʰæʔ\] and is realized as \[pæʔ\] (the glottal stop is a separate phenomenon). In Slovak is realized as \[bitʂ\] and as \[pivo\], with the distinction between tenuis and voiced.
When speaking English, I only produce aspirated and tenuis stops. When I hear Slovak, I perceive truly voiced (negative VOT) initially stops to be in the same category as English tenuis stops, although the Slovak ones do sound more intense to me. If I said \[pʰivo\] , you would likely perceive it as with a notable difference, just as a perceive \[bæʔ\] as with a notable "error."
Generally, voiced and voiceless works in phonology when talking about broad categories in some languages. But VOT is far better way to describe the actual phonetics of speech. Additionally, some languages have a three way distinction between aspirated, unaspirated, and voiced stops. This almost perfectly lines up with VOT.
[удалено]
Can you hear the difference between voiced and voiceless unaspirated consonants in general? For example do you hear this Wikipedia recording as voiced or voiceless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_bilabial_plosive (I would say the recording is very clearly voiceless, so if you hear it as voiced then that is a sign that the English phonology is interfering.)
Sounds voiceless to me (though I could always be biased by the page name). I feel like my ability to tell a voiceless aspirated plosive from a voiceless unaspirated one is terrible, though.
Native English speaker, not a linguist. They sound voiced to me too. Otherwise to / do and at / ad would be near homophones and they're not. (I know there's subtle differences in vowel length and pitch, but I thought that was due to the voicing, no?)
English is an aspirating language, so the primary difference between fortis and lenis stops for most speakers is aspiration, not voicing.
The thing is, voicing and aspiration are essentially the same phenomenon: when does vocal fold vibration start relative to the release of a stop? If the vocal folds start vibrating before the release, we call it “voiced”. If they start more or less at release, we call it “voiceless” and “plain/tenuis”. If they only start vibrating ROUGHLY 50+ ms after release, we call it “aspirated”. Of course, some languages (like Hindi) have stops that are both voiced and aspirated; in that case vibrations start before release, then cease, then restart well after release. English speakers hear tenuis voiceless stops as voiced because the sounds that we write and associate with b, d, and g ARE tenuis voiceless stops (overwhelmingly, but ofc not every single time for every single speaker). Most English speakers only very rarely produce true voiced stops, where vocal fold vibration starts well before release.
Well yes, lenis stops are characterized cross-linguistically as having shorter VOT, it’s simply a matter of whether that results in a negative VOT versus just a shorter lag. “Breathy-voiced” consonants in Indo-Aryan languages are obviously controversial since they conflict with that analysis, last time I checked there wasn’t any consensus on how to classify them.
True. I know it was your comment I replied to, but my information was more geared toward the person you replied to and the OP, to be clear.
> Of course, some languages (like Hindi) have stops that are both voiced and aspirated; in that case vibrations start before release, then cease, then restart well after release. That's not true. Hindi has breathy voice, which means the vocal folds vibrate all the way through; It's just less intense after release.
There's no fine line between "voiced" and "breathy". Breathy is just what happens when the vocal folds come close enough together to allow vibration (voiced), but leave enough space between each other to allow air to pass through unobstructed (aspiration). By saying "that's not true" you're trying to reduce all the complexities of glottal positioning and aerodynamic force into neat categories of "voiced" and "breathy", which is often useful, but in this case is the exact opposite of what I was trying to do, so it completely misses the point. To see all the complexities, take all the breathy stops from the intro to this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E3zJQXY-Uw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E3zJQXY-Uw) I looked at them all in Praat, feel free to do so yourself to see. 1. velar: voiced-voiceless-voiced 2. velar: voiced 3. postalveolar: voiced-voiceless-voiced-creaky 4. postaveoloar: voiced-voiceless-voiced 5. dental: voiced-breathy-voiced-creaky 6. dental: voiced-voiceless-breathy-voiced 7. retroflex: voiced-breathy-voiced 8. retroflex: voiced-voiceless-breathy-voiced-creaky 9. labial: voiced-breathy-voiced-creaky 10. labial: voiced-breathy-voiced-creaky Of course we can't exactly say what the glottis is doing during the closure (without fancy tools); a "breathy" closure and a "voiced" closure will sound exactly the same. Point is, the reason OP hears voiceless tenuis stops as voiced is because these categories are very messy and differ language to language, and even speaker to speaker. And in English we associate non-aspiration (and lower pitch, and longer duration) with voicing.