ABSTRACT
A plosive consonant is formed by stopping the air passage at some point; it consists of three parts: the stop, the release of the stop, and some subsequent sound which follows the release. In English and German the voiceless plosives, when they begin a syllable bearing stress, are aspirated; in French and Italian, on the other hand, the voiceless plosives are unaspirated. In most languages, sounds of a plosive nature are explosive. To distinguish the two different kinds of plosion, the terms explosive and implosive may be used. The term plosive is the common one in use in most books on phonetics. The glottal stop is a plosive consonant made by bringing the vocal cords together momentarily and then releasing them: a slight explosion is heard. Considerable confusion has been caused by investigators of African languages who have not realized the three possible kinds of plosive consonants, viz. aspirated, unaspirated, and voiced.
