kissed - discussed: different pronounciation of ed ending?

[LUPITA]

Hi there

My problem is that I found an exercise related to phonetics where talking about the pronounciation of -ed endings in regular verbs, "kissed" is placed with the /t/ and "discussed" with /d/. is that correct?

thanks in advance

[**C@RL$$**]

correct

[LUPITA]

but why? -ss- in kissed is soundless, isn't it, and in discussed is voiced???? why?

thanks again

[**C@RL$$**]

its kinda hard to explain you should u should ask someone else sorry

[rewboss]

Lupita, I think your first reaction may be correct. As far as I can tell, "discussed" is pronounced with /t/.

At least, that's certainly the way I pronounce it. My wife, sitting behind me, now thinks I'm mad because I've been sitting here saying "discussed, discussed, discussed..."

[Coffa]

Hi Lupita,

The exercise is intended to make you think about the phonetic voiced/unvoiced pairs. In both "kissed" and "discussed", the sibilant 's' is followed by a phoneme that should be voiced - 'd' is the voiced partner of the unvoiced 't'. The human brain requires time to decide to make the effort to voice the phoneme, and lacking that time it will naturally avoid the effort. What the exercise is trying to demonstrate is that "kiss'd" and "cuss'd" are equivalent, but by prefixing the latter with "dis" forces a transition from sibilant to voiced within the word that 'primes' the brain to do the same transition a short time later. In other words, "diss'k" is the same thing phonetically as "kuss'd" and the first trains the brain to do the latter. This does not happen with "kiss'd", so the brain naturally falls back to the easier unvoiced "kiss't".

As rewboss has pointed out though, it's only more likely that you'll voice the final 'd' in "discussed" - it's not guaranteed, because the brain is congenitally lazy about this point. This is why the voiced word ending is continuing to die out.