Affricates

Like the stop consonants, affricates /ʧ/ and /ʤ/ require a stop-like closure period followed by a quick release into a friction noise. If we look at the spectrograms of the pair edging and etching (figure 1), we note the silent period produced by the consonant closure and the noise produced after the release of the consonant closure. Temporal length of the fricative releases is shorter than the closure of the stop portions. Also noteworthy is the difference between the voiceless and voiced members; as expected, the voiceless /ʧ/ is longer than the voiced /ʤ/.

We stated that affricates, although phonetically a combination of a stop and a fricative, function as single units in the sound system of English. The combined duration of an affricate is shorter than the duration of the corresponding stop plus the fricative. This difference can be seen in the spectrograms of gray chip [gɹ̣e tʃɪp] vs. great ship [gɹ̣et ʃɪp] given in figure 2.