Voiced consonant: Encyclopedia - Voiced consonant

Voiced consonant

A voiced consonant is a sound made as the vocal cords vibrate, as opposed to a voiceless consonant, where the vocal cords are relaxed. See phonation for a continuum of degrees of tension in the vocal cords.

Examples of voiced-voiceless pairs of consonants are:

If you place your fingers on your voice box (Adam's apple in your upper throat), you can feel a buzz when you pronounce zzzz, but not when you pronounce ssss. That buzz is the vibration of your vocal cords. Except for this, the sounds [s] and [z] are practically identical, with the same use of tongue and lips.

Other voiced sounds in English are the nasals /m, n, ŋ/, the approximants /l, r, w, j/ (the latter spelled "y"), and the vowels.

In most languages, the difference between /b, d, g/ and /p, t, k/ is that /b, d, g/ are voiced, while /p, t, k/ are not. However, in English, the main distinction is not that /b, d, g/ are voiced, but rather that /p, t, k/ are aspirated. That is, they differ in voice onset time. In most English dialects, /b, d, g/ are partially voiceless in some environments, such as word initially. In fact, after an /s/, where /p, t, k/ lose their aspiration, the contrast with /b, d, g/ is lost; when a child learning English has acquired voicing distinctions, but not yet acquired the /sp, st, sk/ clusters, the child's pronunciation of spy, sty, sky sounds to an adult like buy, die, guy.

There are two variables to degrees of voicing: intensity (discussed under phonation), and duration (discussed under voice onset time). When a sound is described as "half voiced" or "partially voiced", it is not always clear if that means that the voicing is weak (low intensity), or if the voicing only occurs during part of the sound (short duration). In the case of English, it is the latter.

See also

• phonation
• voice onset time
• manner of articulation
• list of phonetics topics

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Voiced consonant", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki