Aspiration on Plosive Consonants

Jim gets into how plosive consonants can have varying degrees of aspiration (explosion) and how to note those with the phonetic alphabet.

You can notice the reduced plosiveness that I talk about here in a variety of Spanish accents, with South Asian (India, Pakistan), and with many South African speakers. You can find materials for these accents and more on Accent Help.

Here's a transcript of the video:

Hey there, Jim Johnson for Accent Help here, and I want to talk about aspiration. So not my own aspirations, but instead about sounds.

So with plosives, they tend to have an explosion to them and Americans tend to have a decent amount of aspiration, as do many English speakers from many different countries. The US, England, definitely you'll tend to have this stronger aspiration, in general. Right?

So what will happen is that you may get this aspiration here on a word like TOP where you feel that explosion. Snd the phonetic symbol for this, if I were to write this word, depending on how exactly we would say it, we might say it like either one of these for many American speakers. Probably most likely this one. And most American speakers are going to do a fairly strong aspiration on that first T. N

ow a lot of people won't do an aspiration on the P. They will go "top" where they sort of make a P, but they don't explode it. So you can either suggest that that also is getting exploded, or you could suggest that it actually has sort of this stop quality to it. So that corner is a phonetic symbol to suggest that it's not getting exploded.

And the vowel differences here are whether you say "top" or whether you say "top" which is more of a British association for many people. "Top stop not" as opposed to "top stop not" for most Americans. So we could have aspiration that happens like that, and this is how you deal with it phonetically.

In addition, you may notice that the aspiration can be very different if you shift it, like if you say the word "top" you won't be as likely to have much aspiration at all if you instead say "stop." So say "top" and notice the explosion of that T: "top." And then say "stop stop." "Top Stop" And you won't notice that same pop, that same breathiness that will come out on the word "stop" as you will have "top." And that's because of that other consonant being before it, that it reduces the aspiration of that.

And then when you're dealing with many accents actually, you'll want to notice that there can be a big difference in the aspiration in that accent, that they may not be as likely to do an aspirated T like that, and say "top" but instead they may say "top top top top," where it doesn't get as exploded. And that can be many different accents that do that.

So there's the concept of, or at least a beginning of the concept of, aspiration, how you would note it phonetically, whether there is or whether there's not, and how it can be different in different positions.

For more info on accents, check out AccentHelp.com.