Flapping in North American Pronunciation: Case 1 'The Change of /t/ and /d/ into [D] in Pronunciation'

Abstract

The North American English is different from the British English in many pronunciation cases. One of these cases is known as flapping in the articulation of which the /t/ and /d/ phonemes are converted into a flap, whose sign is [ D ]. This pronunciation case is frequently heard in many TV broadcasts such as CNN, CNN International, and Voice of America. Flapping, triggered by a phonetic process called neutralization, causes a breakdown is communication. Even advanced students can be “confused with it” (Avery and Ehrlich 1992:42). The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the working mechanism of flapping and rehabilitate its pronunciation difficulty by a sample lessons operated by the audio-articulation method.