The Vowels Of American English Page 10
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15change the quality of the vowels and make them sound different. Students must pronounce
these pairs of vowels with different vowel quality, not simply with a difference in length.
What affects vowel duration?
As it happens, the time duration of any vowel sound varies a lot. All vowel sounds tend to
be longer in some environments and shorter in others. Here are two important principles
that affect the time duration of vowels:
The following sound: The duration of a vowel depends a lot on the sound that comes after
it. Vowel sounds are usually shorter in duration before voiceless sounds and longer before
voiced sounds. They’re longest of all when they come at the end of a word.
There are also slight variations in vowel length before different kinds of voiced sounds.
Vowels are longer before “smooth” sounds like nasals and liquids (which are all voiced in
English) than before “rough” sounds: voiced stops, affricates, and fricatives. However, this
length difference is so small that it’s hard to detect without special measuring instruments.
The same changes in vowel length also happen in words like spent and spend, port and
poured, bolt and bold, even though another consonant—/n/, /r/, or /l/—comes between
the vowel and the final sound. The vowel in the first word in each of these pairs is shorter
than the vowel in the second word.
Why is this change in vowel length important? It’s often hard to hear the difference
between final voiced and voiceless sounds. Stop consonants at the end of words are often
unreleased; that is, they’re not pronounced completely. This makes pairs of sounds like /p/
and /b/, /t/ and /d/, /k/ and /ɡ/ hard to distinguish on their own. The listener’s brain uses
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