“Tony Abbott and his Canadian counterpart, Stephen Harper, have condemned carbon taxes during their first bilateral talks in Ottawa this morning.” (part of Aussie ABC audio; Original source)
I hear Stephen Harber instead of Stephen Harper. Is the presenter really pronouncing Harber? Or am I not differentiating voiced, b, from unvoiced, p? Which is the case? If I’m wrong, would you let me know how to differentiate between the two?
Best Answer
If you're interested in a slightly more technical explanation...
The reason that we're hearing it as /b/ rather than /p/ is likely because the two things that we usually look for are absent:
What you have below are a spectrogram (above) and waveform (middle) with annotations (below) for Harper.
The main issue with stops - of any kind - is that they're relatively boring sounds, there's not much happening in them.
You can see striations at the base of the spectrogram where he pronounces the vowels, but not during /h/ and /p/ - these indicate voicing.
Also, Australian English is non-rhotic - the /r/ in Harper isn't pronounced. Were this pronounced by an American English speaker, for instance, where the /r/ is pronounced, the /p/ is much more obvious and distinct.
Obviously, this kind of answer is more at home on Linguistics.se, but I thought I'd throw this in because I find it really interesting, and it might actually be of use to any language learners who happen to be trained in some articulatory/perceptory phonetics.