six
/sɪks/and sit/sɪt/
Why do they have the same phonetic symbol /sɪ/, if /sɪ/ is pronounced differently in those two words?
The main focus in my question isn't the difference in pronunciation of /sɪ/ between accents. More precisely, why is the same /sɪ/ pronounced
differently in different words in the same accent?I'm an English learner, and that confuses me.
I have made a video for demonstrating the question: https://www.youtube.com/embed/WTabk66hGfk
(Sounds in the video are not mine, they were downloaded from a website)
More appropriate examples could be: sick
/sɪk/, sit/sɪt/and sip/sɪp/
Best Answer
Consonants, as Ladefoged has said, are just different ways of starting and ending vowels. The difference you are hearing are the two different ways of ending the vowel. Bringing the tongue dorsum up to make a complete closure with the velum is a relatively slow gesture that changes the resonant properties of your mouth.
Raising the tongue dorsum up towards the velum causes the second and third formants to move towards each other (phoneticians call it the "velar pinch"), and because the gesture is slow, you can easily perceive the change in the way the vowel sounds during the time it takes for the closure to be made (the pure vowel should have steady formant if pronounced carefully). The gesture for making /t/ is done with the tongue tip, and it is faster and produces less of a disturbance on the vowel. It produces less of a disturbance because vowels are made with the tongue body, which can stay still while the tongue tip flicks up.
However, many English speakers draw their vocal cords together as they form a word-final /t/, creating a creak in the voice or even a complete stop in airflow (unrelated to the stoppage caused by the tongue tip gesture).
Make a sound spectrograph using
praatand you will see more vividly the differences you are hearing. The waveform itself is normally not useful except for illustrating sound intensity.