Practice question · True or false
Voicing can switch on and off within a single consonant.
Hints
- Consider what happens during the closure of an initial "voiced" stop in English.
- Vocal fold vibration is often absent during the closure and begins near release.
Show the answer
True
Why
True, and it undermines the tidy label. English initial "voiced" stops frequently have little or no vibration during the closure; what separates them from voiceless ones is when voicing starts relative to release. Voicing is a state of the larynx through time, not a fixed property stamped on a segment.
Practise How Speech Is Produced
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More questions on How Speech Is Produced
- Why does lowering the velum during a bilabial closure change /b/ into /m/?
- Pitch depends on the rate of vocal fold vibration, whereas resonance depends on the shape of the vocal tract.…
- Sort each articulator by whether it is ACTIVE or PASSIVE.
- Approximately how long is the vocal tract of an adult male, in centimetres?
- Complete the account of speech production.
- Which follow from the fact that speakers produce ten to fifteen sounds per second?
- Match each structure to the contrast it controls.
- Clicks occur only as paralinguistic noises and never as ordinary consonants in a language.