Tom,
>> I am looking for a phonetic contrast which is difficult for English
>> speakers to perceive, as a control stimulus in a study we are setting up.
> Two that boggle my mind in native English speakers are the vowels in
> "ing/ink" and "ang/ank". The question is are they long or short. If
> one were to take a published input source, like m-w.com, cut out the
> vowels from "win/wink/wing" and "ban/bang/bank" would they all be judged
> "short" as every dictionary says. My judgment is that all dictionaries
> are wrong, and only these non ng/nk words have short vowels. The ng/nk
> vowels are long.
> Ive looked at spectrographs of the vowels in win/wing/wink and can sort
> out the difference in win from the other two. It's obvious to hear them
> as well. But I think perhaps that others might not either "hear" them,
> be influenced by another language, or they may be trained not to
> acknowledge a difference. These same native speakers say the word
> "English" has two short "i"s. Just incredible to me.
Plenty of us "hear" them, but since the vowel sound in "wink" follows
the regular allophonic rule (in standard US English) of tongue raising
of front vowels before the voiced velar consonants of /g/ and /N/
("ng"), it's a systematic difference, and nothing strange. The sounds
are in complementary distribution and fully predictable.
Don't you have a similar contrast between the vowels in _back_ and
_bag_/_bang_, and between _peck_ and _peg_/_strength_? Are these two
sets of different-sounding vowels reflected in your phonetic alphabet,
or only the _sin_ vs. _sink_ contrast? The three sets are a "family".
Karen Chung
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