Voiced alveolar plosive

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The voiced alveolar plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is d, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is d.

Features

Features of the voiced alveolar plosive:

• Its manner of articulation is plosive or stop, which means it is produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract.
• Its place of articulation is alveolar which means it is articulated with the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge.
• Its phonation type is voiced, which means the vocal cords are vibrating during the articulation.
• It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
• It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the middle of the tongue, rather than the sides.
• The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.

Varieties of [d]

In English

The voiced alveolar plosive occurs in English, and it is the sound represented by the letter 'd' in dog and bombed. However, in modern English, the letter 'd' does not always denote /d/: in the past participle of verbs ending in a voiceless consonant (e.g., washed), 'd' is devoiced to /t/.

In other languages

The [d] sound is a common sound cross-linguistically. Many languages have at least a plain [d], and some distinguish more than one variety. In many languages, like English, the letter d is used to represent the [d] sound in spellings of words.

See also

• List of phonetics topics