Plosives
Sitio: Aula virtual Facultad de Lenguas Imprimido por: Gabriela Vanesa Ponce Villagra
Curso: Práctica de la Pronunciación del Inglés 2021 Día: jueves, 22 de mayo de 2025, 10:56
Libro: Plosives
Tabla de contenidos
1. Introduction
2. /p, b/
3. /t, d/
4. /k, g/
5. Past endings of regular verbs
6. Practice on past endings
1. Introduction
Let's revise some basic concepts we saw in the presentation. We also invite you to watch again the part in which
plosives are introduced.
English has three pairs of voiceless and voiced plosives at the bilabial, alveolar and velar places of articulation.
For /p/ and /b/, the lips come together and form a complete closure, stopping the air stream.
For /d/ and /d/, a complete closure is formed by the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge and by the side of the
tongue against the upper side teeth.
Flor /k/ and /g/, the back of the tongue forms a closure against the soft palate and the rear of the sides of the tongue
forms a seal against the rear upper side teeth.
(Carley, Mees, & Collins, 2018, p. 15)
The English plosives differ from the Spanish sounds /p, t, k, b, d, g/. Apart from the fact that some of them do not
share the same place and manner of articulation, an accurate pronunciation of the English sounds /p, t, k, b, d, g/ calls
for much more tension of the articulators. Besides, when producing /p, t, k, b, d, g/ in English, a greater amount of
compressed air escapes abruptly.
Imagine you're imitating a native speaker of English speaking in Spanish. How would you say these words?
BOTA, DEDO, GOTA, ATACÓ
2. /p, b/
Let's watch this short video to recap on some basic concepts related to these two consonant sounds.
Voiced Consonant Sound 01
NonNativeSpeaker
Ver en
These two sounds, /p/ and /b/ are thoroughly practised in Unit 8 in Sounds English. Although you're expected to cover
tasks 1, 2 and 3 in the unit, we'll help you prepare task 2.2a.
These are the steps we suggest that you follow whenever you approach a text for oral practice:
1. Listen to the audio file. If you do that first, you get the chance to:
get familiar with the topic of the text;
get familiar with the voices of the speakers;
spot words you don't know the meaning of;
spot words whose pronunciation you aren't sure about.
2. We invite you to do some dictionary work. There are a couple of words whose pronunciation we'd better check. All
of them contain the sounds in focus: /p/ and /b/.
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3. Now that you have all the information you need, let's do some imitation. Listen to short chunks of the dialogue and
repeat.
REMEMBER!
- Don't speed up! If you want to sound fluent, you just have to link words to one another and avoid pausing at incorrect
places.
- If you find difficult combinations, isolate the word or group of words that contains them. Once you've succeeded in
producing that, incorporate the rest.
Here are some parts of the dialogue we, Spanish speakers, generally find difficult:
It was a present for a friend abroad.
The parcel was damaged in the post.
But it happened in the post.
The Post Office said that the parcel wasn´t properly packed.
We wrap up hundreds of pullovers.
- Finally, don't forget consonant sounds in final position. Many of them are plosives that shouldn't be elided.
GOOD JOB!
When we work with endings, we´ll come back to this dialogue.
3. /t, d/
Let's watch this short video to recap on some basic concepts related to these two consonant sounds.
BBC Learning English The Sounds of English Voiceless
CCTV Learn Chinese
Ver en
These two sounds, /t/ and /d/, are thoroughly practised in Unit 9 in Sounds English. Although you're expected to cover
tasks 1, 2 and 3 in the unit, we'll help you prepare task 2.
To practice this or any other reading task, we suggest that you follow the steps we mentioned on the previous page in
this book.
1. Listen to the audio file and write on the Padlet only the times you hear.
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privacy setting to 'secret' or 'public' if
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ABRIR PADLET EN UNA NUEVA PESTAÑA
2. Now, practice reading the times as you listen to the audio file. Make sure you produce /t/ with lots of air and with
the tip of the tongue touching the alveolar ridge.
GOOD JOB!
4. /k, g/
Let's watch this short video to recap on some basic concepts related to these two consonant sounds.
BBC Learning English The Sounds of English Voiced Co
CCTV Learn Chinese
Ver en
These two sounds, /k/ and /g/, are thoroughly practised in Unit 10 in Sounds English. Although you're expected to cover
tasks 1, 2 and 3 in the unit, we'll help you prepare tasks 2a and 3a.
To practice these or any other reading task, we suggest that you follow the steps we mentioned on the first page of
this book.
1. Let's warm up a bit repeating words with /k/ and /g/ in both dialogues. We provide a model for some of them.
2. Let's work on transcription. We've chosen parts from the dialogues we believe pose some kind of difficulty. Feel
free to transcribe the whole texts in your copybooks (in a couple of days, both transcriptions will be available)
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Please open the embedded padlet in a new tab to access it.
Change the privacy setting to 'secret' or 'public' if you would like
the padlet to be viewable here.
ABRIR PADLET EN UNA NUEVA PESTAÑA
Click here to access the KEY to the transcriptions (still not available)
3. Prepare both texts to be read in a loud voice. We suggest doing this practice together with a classmate so that you
can get peer feedback of your oral performance. You can show us how much you've improved during a live session
with your teachers.
GREAT JOB!!!!
5. Past endings of regular verbs
In English there are some phonological rules which govern how we pronounce the plural forms, the 3rd person singular
of verbs in the Simple Present, the Genitive Case, the past endings, among others. Those rules help speakers to link
sounds that share some phonological features. Native speakers and non-native speakers learning English as a foreign
language do not produce these words correctly and drop their endings causing possible misunderstandings in a
communicative situation. As future professionals of the language, we need to incorporate these rules so as not to
make undesired mistakes when speaking.
In this chapter we will concentrate on PAST ENDINGS
THERE ARE THREE RULES FOR THE PAST ENDINGS OF REGULAR VERBS
RULE 1
The past form of regular verbs ending in voiceless /p/, /k/,/ tʃ/, /θ/, /f/, /s/, /ʃ/ is pronounced /t/.
Let's see some examples:
Picked /pɪkt/
Laughed /lɑːft/
Smashed /smæʃt/
Remember: VOICELESS SOUNDS ATTRACT VOICELESS ENDINGS
RULE 2
The past form of regular verbs ending in a vowel or voiced /b/, /g/,/dʒ/, /v/, /ð/, /z/, /ʒ/, /m/, /n/, /l/ is pronounced
/d/.
Let's see some examples:
Moved /muːvd/
Phoned / fəʊnd/
Stayed /steɪd/
Remember: VOICED SOUNDS ATTRACT VOICED ENDINGS
RULE 3
The past form of regular verbs ending in /t/ or /d/ is pronounced /ɪd/
Let's see some examples:
Visited /vɪzɪtɪd/
Loaded /ləʊdɪd/
Decided /dɪsaɪdɪd/
6. Practice on past endings
Now we want you to put all the theory into practice.
Exercise 1. If you click here you will find an interactive game for you to refresh some concepts that have already been
introduced.
Exercise 2. The following activity is a questionnaire for you to work on your receptive skills. Once you listen to the
recording, you can choose the correct answer. Click here to have access to that activity.
Exercise 3. In this padlet you are going to listen to a person talking about a past event. See if you can recognise the
verbs used and pay particular attention to past endings. Click here to start working on it.
Exercise 4. It´s time to work on perception and production. You´ll work with a text that was previously mentioned and
you'll pay special attention to past endings. The idea is to see how much you've learnt and improved so far by putting
all your knowledge at work. Click here to start working!
