Hi again and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast.

My name is Mandy, and this is our 114th episode.

We've put a new introduction to stops lesson up on pronunciation, and since a little extra explanation never hurts, I thought I'd cover some of the subtle details of it.

If you've been listening to these podcasts for a while, you probably already know that stop sounds are consonant sounds that require the air to be completely stopped

at the beginning of the sound. You probably also know that they all occur in voiced, unvoiced pairs.

You get bonus points if you can name all six stop sounds right now.

I'll give you a few seconds to think about it.

How many did you get?

You probably got the T sound and D sound, since I talk about them so much,

and maybe the P sound and B sound, since I talk about them so much, and maybe the P sound and B sound, since we recently

compared them to the V sound and F sound. Did you also remember the K sound and G sound?

If so, great job. Here they are again. T sound, D sound. T, D. P sound, B sound, P, B, P, K sound, G sound, G. There are three details of those sounds that I want you to be aware of, although we're only going to explain two of them today.

First, the aspiration, that's the puff of air as the stop is released, is greater for unvoiced sounds than voiced sounds.

Second, the aspiration is greatest at the beginning of words and the beginning of stressed syllables.

And third, the duration of vowel sounds before voiced stops is greater than the duration of a vowel

sound before an unvoiced stop. First, let's talk about the difference in aspiration between

voiced and unvoiced stops. This actually matters for listener comprehension.

It seems like such a trivial fact, but actually it is rather important.

If your listeners ever heard a voiced sound, the D sound, B sound, or G sound,

when you were saying an unvoiced sound, the T-sound, P-sound, or K-sound,

it may have been because you were not releasing the unvoiced sound with enough puff of air.

We expect that puff, and if it isn't there, we might interpret a different sound.

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