Voice (phonetics)

Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds,
with sounds described as either voiceless (unvoiced) or voiced. The term, however, is used to
refer to two separate concepts. Voicing can refer to the articulatory process in which the
vocal cords vibrate. This is its primary use in phonetics to describe |phones, which are
particular speech sounds. It can also refer to a classification of speech sounds that tend to be
associated with vocal cord vibration but need not actually be voiced at the articulatory level.
This is the term's primary use in phonology when describing phonemes, or in phonetics when
describing phones.

At the articulatory level, a voiced sound is one in which the vocal cords vibrate, and a
voiceless sound is one in which they do not. Voicing is the difference between the pairs of
sounds that are associated with the English letters "s" and "z". The two sounds are
symbolically written IPA| [s] and IPA| [z] to distinguish them from the English letters, which
have several possible pronunciations depending on context. If one places the fingers on the
voice box (ie the location of the Adam's apple in the upper throat), one can feel a vibration
when one pronounces "zzzz", but not when one pronounces "ssss". (For a more detailed,
technical explanation, see modal voice and phonation.) In European languages such as
English, vowels and other sonorants (consonants such as "m, n, l," and "r)" are modally
voiced.

When used to classify speech sounds, voiced and unvoiced are merely labels used to group
phones and phonemes together for the purposes of classification. We return to this below.

English examples

The distinction between the articulatory use of voice and the phonological use rests on the
distinction between phone and phoneme. The difference is best illustrated by a rough
example. Words are composed of phonemes. The English word "pods" is made up of a
sequence of phonemes, represented symbolically as "/padz/", or the sequence of /p/, /a/, /d/,
and /z/. Each letter is an abstract symbol for a phoneme. This is a part of our grammatical
knowledge.

Consonant phonemes are classified as either voiced or voiceless. Some voiced phonemes of
English are /b,d,g,v,z/. Each of these obstruents has an unvoiced counterpart, /p,t,k,f,s/. The
classification is useful for describing phonological processes such as vowel lengthening that
occurs before voiced consonants but not before unvoiced consonants or vowel quality
changes (i.e. the sound of the vowel) in some dialects of English that occur before unvoiced
but not voiced consonants.

However, phonemes are not sounds. Rather, phonemes are, in turn, converted to phones
before being spoken. The /z/ phoneme, for instance, can be pronounced as the [s] phone or
the [z] phone, depending on context, and so the sequence of phones for "pods" might be
[pads] or [padz] . The different type of brackets indicates that these are symbols for phones
now. As described above, while the [z] phone has articulatory voicing, the [s] phone does not.
It is hard to directly observe the difference between [pods] and [podz] because of the voicing
in the preceding [d] , but one can readily see that both pronunciations are common using
digital audio tools.
English has four pairs of fricative phones which can be divided into a table by place of
articulation and voicing. The voiced fricatives can readily be felt to have voicing throughout
the duration of the phone.

Other English sounds, the vowels, nasals, and liquids (called sonorants), are normally fully
voiced. However, these consonants and unstressed vowels may be devoiced in certain
positions, especially after aspirated consonants, as in "police, tree," and "play," where the
voicing is delayed to the extent of missing the sonorant altogether.

Beside the pairs of voiceless and voiced 'obstruent' consonants given above, other voiced
sounds in English are the nasals, i.e. IPA|/m, n, ŋ/; the approximants, i.e. IPA|/l, r, w, j/ (the last
spelled as the English letter ); and the vowels. These sounds are called sonorants.

Degrees of voicing

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 whether 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.

Voice and tenseness

There are languages with two sets of contrasting obstruents that are labelled IPA|/p t k f s x …/
vs. IPA|/b d ɡ v z ɣ …/ even though there is no involvement of voice (or voice onset time) in that
contrast. This happens for instance in several Southern German dialects such as Alsatian or
Swiss German. Since voice is not involved, this is explained as a contrast in tenseness, called
a fortis and lenis contrast.

There is a hypothesis that the contrast between fortis and lenis consonants is related to the
contrast between voiceless and voiced consonants, a relation based on sound perception as
well as on sound production, where consonant voice, tenseness and length are but different
manifestations of a common sound feature.

ee also

*Phonation
*Voice onset time
*Manner of articulation
*Place of articulation

References