The Silent Interval of Stop Consonants

An experiment was conducted to measure the silent interval (SI) preceding the burst of all the stop consonants in English. A list of words was constructed for each pair of stop cognates. More commonly used words with stop cognates in similar environments were chosen for the experiment. Six subjects spoke these lists and their speech samples were analysed with the aid of a digital computer and a precision display unit. The average durations of the SI found in descending order were: /p/, 117.64 msec; /k/, 113.09 msec; /t/, 102.04 msec; /b/, 85.58 msec; /g/, 79.97 msec, and /d/, 68.59 msec. The average difference in SI between the voiceless and voiced stop. cognates was about 33 msec. and the average ratio between them was about 1.4. By taking a variety of environments into consideration, the analysis of the SI yielded a result which suggests that the duration of the SI is strongly influenced by different phonetic environments: when homorganic nasal phonemes preceded, the SI was short; when short vowels preceded, the SI was long; when there was a stress pattern in the words, the SI was short.