English Pronunciation Vowel Length Affected by Ending Consonant American Accent
This video is a spin off of the Can Vs. Can’t
video. We’re going to take one of the concepts
from that video and broaden it into a general
rule. One of the ways you can tell the difference
between can and can’t is the length of the
word. Can will be a little longer and a little
smoother than can’t, which will be a little
bit more abrupt. Can’t, can’t. That’s because
of the stop T, which makes that abrupt ending.
The T in an unvoiced consonant. And as a general
rule, a one syllable word that ends in an
unvoiced consonant will be shorter than the
same word if it was to end in a voiced consonant.
So here the final consonant is actually affecting
vowel length. Let’s look at some examples.
Rack, rag. Rack, rag. Do you hear that the
second word is just a little bit longer? That’s
because of the voiced consonant at the end.
Here you see the word rack on the left compared
with rag on the right. You can see that the
length of rack is shorter. Hid, hit. Hid,
hit. I hope you can see that that second word,
hit, is very abrupt. Need, neat. Need, neat.
Safe, save. Safe, save. Second word: longer.
Ride, write. Ride, write. This actually answers
a question that someone sent me in an email
quite a while ago. How to tell the difference
between fall and fault. The only difference
in IPA is the T, and as you know, final T’s
are often not released. Fall, fault. Can you
hear that the second one is shorter? Fault,
fault. It’s that stop T that’s cutting off
the sound, that unvoiced consonant at the
end that, even though it is not released,
does affect the vowel length. That’s it and
thanks so much for using Rachel’s English.