Re: Pronouncing Tokana (was RE: Importance of stress)

Christophe a ecrit:

>The strange thing for me is about this aspiration and the fact that
>non-aspirated voiceless stops can sound like voiced to English speakers. As
>a Frenchman trying to learn English, I nearly never heard a difference
>between the 't' in 'top' and the 't' in 'stop', when spoken by a native
>English speaker (sometimes I do, but I must be very careful when I listen
>to the person - when I do that, generally I can't remember *what* the
>person said, only *how* s/he said it :) - ). Confusing voiceless and voiced
>stops seems also rather strange to me, as English has both. I can
>understand that from a speaker of Mandarin, but not of English. Does that
>really happen? I mean, when you hear a foreigner speaking English, do you
>sometimes hear a voiced stop at the beginning of a word which was in fact
>pronounced voiceless non-aspirated?
English may distinguish voiced from voiceless stops, but I think that
(in word-initial position, anyway) the primary phonetic cue for the
contrast is aspiration:  If the initial stop is aspirated, it gets 'read'
as voiceless, and if it's unaspirated, it gets 'read' as voiced, regardless
of what the actual voicing of the sound may be.  In trying to teach
phonetics to college students, I've noticed that they often have
tremendous difficulty hearing whether a stop is voiced or voiceless:
If I ask them, "Is /z/ voiced or voiceless?", they can answer right
away.  But if I ask them "Is /b/ voiced or voiceless?", they have no
idea, and have to look it up on the chart.  On the other hand, they
generally have no difficulty distinguishing aspirated from
unaspirated stops, once they understand what to listen for.

Matt.