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There are five segments in the clip. Are all the ts in "But I..." pronounced out the flap t sound? I personally can hear the flap t sound in the second and third segments. The first and fourth are not that clear. And the fifth, I don't hear the flap t sound at all and the t sounds like a stop t or a silent t. Are there any native English speakers help me with that?

ColleenV
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questionguy
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    They all sound like flaps (I've always preferred the term taps though) to me except the 5th, which sounds like an [ t⁼ ] unvoiced unaspirated apical alveolar stop. – GArthurBrown May 31 '21 at 10:57
  • Thanks, GArthur. Theoretically, the t in the fifth should a tap/flap t as well, right? But, the speaker makes a pause before "but" so that the t in "but" becomes a stop t. Am I right? –  May 31 '21 at 12:53
  • They're all similar. Obama's second But-I is the least pronounced. Note the flap attaches to the I, not the But: Ba-DYE. If the T does not compare to a D to your ear, think of it as the slightest flap of a rolled R. – Yosef Baskin May 31 '21 at 13:03
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    In the fifth, there's definitely a /t/ sound. I think it's an unaspirated /t/ rather than a flap /t/ (it's hard for native speakers to hear the difference — they all sound like /t/s to us). The speaker may not use a flap /t/ here because she's enunciating carefully, because it's a video for ESL students. I wouldn't think it has anything to do with a pause before the but. – Peter Shor May 31 '21 at 13:52
  • As opposed to what, a glottal stop? Standard English pronunciation, no matter which side of which pond you're on, is to tap the tip of the tongue against the soft pallet to make a T sound and releasing whenever it is immediately followed by a vowel sound, like is the case in all of those examples. Relatively few accents don't do so by instead employing a glottal stop, which, again, none of those do. The biggest difference you'll hear between accents isn't if there's no tap and release there but if that tap and release there is voiceless or voiced, i.e., if it sounds like a true T or like a D. – Benjamin Harman May 31 '21 at 17:13
  • ‘...to tap the tip of the tongue against the soft pallet to make a T sound..’ Re: @BenjaminHarman: You probably wanted to say ‘against the alveolar ridge’ rather than the soft palate. – Void May 31 '21 at 17:21
  • Is there any particular reason you want to know this? Most native speakers probably don't know the difference between a flap t sound and a standard d sound. – Tanner Swett May 31 '21 at 18:48
  • @TannerSwett: just because native speakers don't know the difference, it doesn't mean that we don't unconsciously perceive the difference. If somebody substituted real d's [d] for all their flapped t's [ɾ], I suspect we would perceive them as having a foreign accent. (On the other hand, I also suspect we would understand them perfectly well.) – Peter Shor May 31 '21 at 19:12
  • @PeterShor Yup, I agree. I probably should have put a "consciously" in there somewhere. – Tanner Swett May 31 '21 at 20:56
  • 5th one is a /t/ with a glottal stop. Rest sound like flaps to me – gotube May 31 '21 at 21:40
  • @TannerSwett I just wanna make sure if I am right about the fifth which is different from the others since I need to get familiar with what I've learned. Apparently, an English learner can't be that good in hearing to distinguish the subtle difference when native English speakers speak quickly. In particular, the fifth doesn't conform to the rule of the flap/tap t sound. Then, I was wondering if this could be an exception. I need to figure it out. – questionguy Jun 01 '21 at 04:26
  • I think the reason that the fifth speaker doesn't use the flap t is that she's speaking slowly and emphatically. Slow and emphatic speech is more likely to use the "full" pronunciation of words, and less likely to contain "speech shortcuts" such as the flap t. She also uses the full pronunciation of the word "your" instead of the short pronunciation. – Tanner Swett Jun 01 '21 at 04:31

1 Answers1

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TLDR: all of them are flaps except for the last one which sounds like an unaspirated t.

First and foremost, native speakers think of all the T's a single sound—/t/, that is, all those sounds are stored as a single sound ('phoneme') in their minds so they might not notice the phonetic difference between a flap and a normal t. A phoneme is a 'meaningful unit' in that it distinguishes one word from another, for example, tap is distinguished from cap by a single phoneme (/t/), so we would say that /t/ and /k/ are different phonemes because cap and tap are different words having different meanings. I recently came across a language known as 'Samoan' where [t] and [k] don't distinguish words i.e. they are a single phoneme (meaningful unit) so we would say that both [t] and [k] are the allophones of a single phoneme /t/ (or perhaps /k/, I'm not entirely sure).

Likewise, [tʰ], [t], [ɾ], [t̚] and [ʔ] occur as allophones of the phoneme /t/ in English. Although native speakers do (and can) hear the difference between all those sounds, they think of them as the same sound—/t/. Unfortunately, native speakers cannot help you 'hear' the flap, the only thing you need is long-term exposure to hearing the flap. In the clip you provided, all of them are flaps except for the last one which sounds (to me) like an unaspirated t: [t˭].

NOTES:

  • [tʰ] is called aspirated t which occurs at the start of a stressed syllabe as in time, top, tool etc.
  • [t] is a t sound without aspiration. Unaspirated t usually occurs after an S as in stop, steel, stall etc.
  • [ɾ] is called an alveolar flap which usually occurs where an intervocalic (between vowels) /t/ is unstressed. It's mostly found in American accents.
  • [t̚] is called unreleased t i.e. no released of the closure made for the t. It usually occurs at the end of an utterance (as in bat in some accents)
  • [ʔ] is called glottal stop. It usually occurs at the end of words as in hate, mate, but in some accents.
Void
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  • Thanks for your explicit explanation, Void. I am practicing listening and try to get familiar with these sounds. That is why I came up this question. – questionguy Jun 01 '21 at 04:50