Voiceless preaspirated plosives

If voicing stops before a complete closure is achieved, i.e. the vocal folds allow air to pass through while the closure is still being made, this results in a short period of voicelessness and friction as the closure is being made, and is commonly known as preaspiration, though there are two types.

Voiceless friction can be generated as the articulators approximate one another. This can be transcribed using the appropriate fricative symbol, e.g. . Shortness is indicated by a superscript.

The other source of noise is turbulence at the glottis. This source of noise is transcribed as e.g.  and is known as preaspiration.

Preaspiration is not common in English, but has been reported for word- and utterance-final plosives in Tyneside, North east England (Watt and Allen 2003), and Hull (Williams and Kerswill, in Foulkes and Docherty 1999: 147).

Figure 7.8 shows a spectrogram and waveform of part of the word ‘loop’, , as spoken by a young female speaker from Tyneside. In this production, voicing stops before the closure is made, resulting in a short period of voiceless friction. The friction is similar to that in the release part of the plosive. It could also transcribed as  or , since the friction is at the lips and there is audible lip-rounding.