Fricatives from undershoot

The third group of fricatives we will consider here can be thought of as plosives that do not have the complete closure needed to create plosion. These are fricatives that arise from undershoot: that is, where articulators fail to make the complete closure needed to produce a plosive. These are rather common in ordinary speech in all varieties of English

In normal speech, these sounds are barely audible as fricatives; often, it is only through close inspection of a recording that they are clearly hearable as fricative rather than plosive articulations. The entry into these fricatives is rather tight and fast; and they are short in duration in comparison with the fricatives we looked at in the early part here.

Here is an example of two such fricatives. The speaker speaks a variety of London English.