Flap Minimal Pairs

A common phonological rule of North American English is to change /t,d/ to a “flap” transcribed as either quasi Americanist [D] or IPA [ɾ] (indicating that this sound is a type of <r>).

Note: I tend to use [D] for the North American English flap since Americans think this sound is either /t,d/ and rarely confuse it with /r/ …unless they think the word is Spanish. Similarly the North American flap sounds an awful like like a “d” to other non-American English speakers (like the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary who feel that Americans pronounce atom with a “d”).

BUT, If you’re an IPA purist just close your eyes and change [D] to [ɾ].

Is that [D] a /t/ or a /d/?

In phonology class, I present cases where a flapped /t,d/ could cause potential ambiguities (see below).

  • a[D]om bomb, A[D]am’s rib
  • Swe[D]ish ‘from Sweden’, swee[D]ish ‘slightly sweet’
  • ri[D]er, wri[D]er
  • Toy Yo[D]a, Toyo[D]a as seen in this prize lawsuit
  • Penn State Policy AD 20 (“an AD-20 rule”) vs. the “80-20 rule”.

As it happens, in many North American dialects (including mine), the vowel before original (underlying) /d/ is slightly longer phonetically than original /t/. Thus the vowel of “toy Y[o:D]a” is slightly, but perceptibly longer than “Toy[oD]a” in many dialects of American English. That’s why there isn’t more confusion in conversational North American English.

FYI – When the Oxford English Dictionary started transcribing the U.S. pronunciation of atom with a /d/, a lot of U.S. English speaking linguists objected that it was still a /t/. The lengthening rule again partly explains this U.S. native speaker intuition. Not that linguists always pay as much attention to native speaker intuition as much as they should.

A Rare Confusions with <r>

Technically speaking, the North American flap IS a type of <r>, specifically a rhotic tap. It’s the Spanish single “r” as in pero /peɾo/. As I mentioned before, few English speakers will perceive the North American as a rhotic. This is probably because English <r> is not a tap, but an very marked alveolar approximant /ɹ/.

But if sometimes the confusion can happen if Spanish or Spanish like phonology is introduced into the word. For example, when I watched the Roswell sci-fi show (set in Roswell, NM), there was an alien character apparently known from local Native American tribal memory. For years, I thought it was a Spanish style name Nasero /naseɾo/, but actually it was Nasedo [naseɾo]. On the flip side, I had a friend with a Mexican American sister in law named Yerida /jeɾida/, but my Anglo friend thought the name was Yedida [jeɾiɾa].

I would be curious to see if there is research comparing the acoustics and perception of the North American flap vs. other languages.

5 thoughts on “Flap Minimal Pairs

  1. Pingback: Pronounce double t in AmE - English Vision

  2. MichelleKGross

    My observations: Chat with English speakers outside of NA and they will often either perceive the flap as sloppy or refuse to believe that you want /waDa/ when you ask for “water.” Is there tongue-spreading as a portion of the tongue (not the tip) strikes the alveolar ridge? Thank you for pointing out the vowel-duration. Americans largely do not perceive the Spanish “pero” to have the same tap as the English “Kato” (from the Green Hornet TV series). The r and tap are the litmus test of bilingualism and politics when people say “Puerto Rico.”

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  3. Jerry

    I have a friend originally from Ecuador named Mayra. Before I learned the spelling of her name I would have thought Mida.

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  4. John Goldsmith

    I wonder if the examples you’ve given here should be under the rubric “minimal pair,” since that term is usually used to refer to cases that are phonetically distinct. I’d give, instead, pairs like “Do you want to seat a Pookah?” and “Do you want to see Topeka?” (not quite perfect, but pretty darn close). Here the difference of the pronunciations (no flap in the second) is due to the difference caused by the placement of a word boundary in different places.
    goldsmith@uchicago.edu

    Reply
    1. Elizabeth Pyatt Post author

      For me, these examples start out as minimal pairs (even if they sometimes cross word boundaries) and remain distinct phonetically because my dialect has vowel lengthening differences. Without the vowel lengthening, there would be more true phonetic merges.

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