Jj is for Jottings 47.  Minimal Pairs: Voiced vs. Voiceless.

 

You may not have noticed this before, but many of our consonant sounds in English come in pairs.  The sounds are the same except for the fact that one uses the voice and the other does not.  You’ll see what I mean when I tell you what the pairs are (with the first of each pair being the voiceless one): /p,b/; /t,d/; /k,g/; /f,v/; /s,z/; /ch,j/; /sh and the sound in the middle of “measure”, which does not have a letter to represent it/; and /th/ – voiceless, as in “thumb” and voiced, as in “the, mother”.  A minimal pair is a pair of sounds or words that differ by only one feature, in this case voicing.  Other minimal pairs may differ by a whole sound eg. beg/big; bat/bag.

Before we go any further, I should explain that the slashes (/ /) mark the fact that we are talking about a sound as opposed to a letter name.  This is explained in more detail in the introduction to Aa is for Alpacas. 

When teaching the sounds made by letters, many adults (including teachers) fall into the trap of adding the schwa vowel to voiceless consonants, with the result that /p/, for example, ends up as /pə/ i.e. a voiceless consonant, /p/, with a voiced consonant , /ə/, added to the end.  It should be just /p/ followed by breath.  Voicing voiceless consonants to children confuses them in the following ways:

• They find it more difficult to discriminate between sounds (because /pə/ sounds much more like /b/ than a proper voiceless /p/).
• It leads to some children having difficulty in identifying where one sound ends and the next begins.
• It makes blending sounds into a word difficult because the unnecessary voicing adds more sounds to the word. An example: You are trying to sound out the word.   The two consonants /h/ and /p/ are voiceless, and of course all vowels are voiced.  Therefore the only part of the word which you should voice is the /o/.   /h/, /o/, /p/ = hop.  If you voice the voiceless consonants, however, you get /hə/, /o/, pə/ – five sounds, three of which are vowels.  It will be much more difficult to perceive the word hop now.

Some children have difficulties with the voiced/voiceless phenomenon in their speech.  It’s usually confined to voicing /p,t,k/ or maybe even just one of those, but it is remarkable just how difficult it makes them to understand when they voice all three of them.  And it is quite difficult to remediate, too.

Please be aware of the voiceless sounds and given them a fair go – your child’s literacy will be much the better for it.

 

See also: https://educatingalpacas.com/more-minimal-pairs-voiced-vs-voiceless/