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The concept of voice onset time can be traced back as far as the 19th century, when Adjarian (1899: 119) [1] studied the Armenian stops, and characterized them by "the relation that exists between two moments: the one when the consonant bursts when the air is released out of the mouth, or explosion, and the one when the larynx starts vibrating".
The Spanish voiceless stops /p t k/ have voice onset times (VOTs) of about 5, 10, and 30 milliseconds, and English aspirated /p t k/ have VOTs of about 60, 70, and 80 ms. Voice onset time in Korean has been measured at 20, 25, and 50 ms for /p t k/ and 90, 95, and 125 for /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ .
In other words, it has the "plain" phonation of [p, t, ts, tʃ, k] with a voice onset time close to zero (a zero-VOT consonant), as Spanish p, t, ch, k or English p, t, k after s (spy, sty, sky). For most languages, the distinction is relevant only for stops and affricates. However, a few languages have analogous series for fricatives.
The voice onset time (VOT) helps to measure the second language speaker’s proficiency by analysing the participants’ ability to detect distinctions between similar-sounding phonemes. [6] VOT refers to "the time interval between the onset of the release burst of a stop consonant and the onset of periodicity from vocal fold vibration" [5] (p
What is varying along this continuum is voice-onset-time: the "b" in [ba] has shorter VOT than the "p" in [pa] (i.e. the vocal folds start vibrating around the time of the release of the occlusion for [b], but tens of miliseconds later for [p]; but note that different varieties of English may implement VOT in different ways to signal contrast).
For example, if English-learning infants are exposed to a prevoiced /d/ to voiceless unaspirated /t/ continuum (similar to the /d/ - /t/ distinction in Spanish) with the majority of the tokens occurring near the endpoints of the continuum, i.e., showing extreme prevoicing versus long voice onset times (bimodal distribution) they are better at ...
That said, the onset cluster /tl/ is permitted in most of Latin America, the Canaries, and the northwest of Spain, and the fact that it is pronounced in the same amount of time as the other voiceless stop + lateral clusters /pl/ and /kl/ support an analysis of the /tl/ sequence as a cluster, rather than an affricate, in Mexican Spanish.
For example, one of the most studied cues in speech is voice onset time or VOT. VOT is a primary cue signaling the difference between voiced and voiceless plosives, such as "b" and "p". Other cues differentiate sounds that are produced at different places of articulation or manners of articulation. The speech system must also combine these cues ...