hello Jennifer from Tarle speech with your pronunciation question I have a very
interesting question today are vowel sounds different lengths if words end in
a voiced or voiceless sound and the answer is yes they are different lengths
so this is a little bit more of an advanced lesson even if you're not ready
to try these advanced pronunciations you might find this interesting in terms of
listening to people and it might help you understand English
a little bit easier so I'm going to teach this lesson with two sounds the
voiced and the voiceless counterpart so let's start with the voiced D sound
that is made with the tip of your tongue touching the back of your top front
teeth and the voice box is on D now if you take the voice box part out of it
and just touch the tip of your tongue to the back of your top front teeth T T T that is
the voiceless counterpart to that D sound so your mouth does the same thing
the only difference in these sounds are what happens in your voice okay so now
that we know that let's think about all vowel sounds all vowels sounds are
voiced so it makes sense that if we have a vowel sound and a voiced sound our
brain is going to say oh we have a voiced sound oh we have a voiced
consonant at the end I'm going to keep my voice on for that vowel and then just
move right into that voiced sound that vowel will sound a little teeny tiny bit
longer than if you're saying that voiced vowel and then your brain sees oh there
is a voiceless sound coming up I need to turn my voice off I'm gonna turn it off
and that vowel is going to sound a little teeny tiny bit shorter okay so
the vowel is slightly longer if the word ends in a voiced sound
it's slightly shorter if the word ends in a voiceless sound but the vowels are
the same okay so let's take a look at this okay
these are minimal pair words meaning the words are the same except for one sound
and in this case it is the last sound so we're going to use the H for all of
these two just to make them as similar as possible okay so our first two word
combinations we're going to start with the voiceless and then we're going to
have the voiced so we have voiceless here and then voiced here so we have hat
had hat had and then we have ooh oh that is correct
heat heed I thought it spelled something wrong heat heed hit hid hit hid hurt
heard hurt heard so I'm gonna say the words and two different columns all
voiceless hat heat hit hurt and now all the voiced had heed hid heard and then
I'm going to contrast them again hat had heat heed hit hid hurt heard and I'm
gonna go backwards so you can hear the difference heard hurt hid hit heed heat
had hat so I hope you found this lesson helpful if you liked it please let me
know if you didn't please let me know it just kind of helps me gauge what people
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