4 ms·
I wonder if this might be a mental artifact of being aware of the spelling. Kids probably would hear no difference between 'scent', 'cent', or 'sent'.
by Koshkin 5y ago
I wonder if this might be a mental artifact of being aware of the spelling. Kids probably would hear no difference between 'scent', 'cent', or 'sent'.
- WorldMaker 5y agoThinking about it from my dialect, I do think there is a stronger voicing on the "s" in "scent" and "cent" but not the "s" in "sent" (might even be as distinct as /s/ versus /z/? But probably with a partial-voiced marker on one or the other?). Also, I think "cent" is the only one where the vowel seems always forced, not schwa-ed /ə/. It's not always the case, but there can be a reason to believe that spelling differences may have arisen in such cases from trying to explain subtle distinctions that mattered to someone's dialect before a lot of the modern work went into the IPA and actually capturing those subtle differences.
- Koshkin 5y agoYes, being able to make a clear distinction is important, and subtle variations in pronunciation, whether officially recognized or not, do help. That's why, in particular, people tend to say "fur" instead of "for" - in order (my guess) to avoid confusing it with "four" (which is expected to appear more often in everyday speech than "fur" and "fir").