Flapping in North American Pronunciation: Case 1 The Change of /t / and /d / into [D] in Pronunciation

The North American English is different from the British English in many pronunciation cases. One of these cases is known as flapping in the articulation of which the / t / and /d / phonemes are converted into a flap, whose sign is [D]. This pronunciation case is frequently heard in many TV broadcasts such as CNN, CNN International, and Voice of America. Flapping, triggered by a phonetic process called neutralization, causes a breakdown is communication. Even advanced students can be “confused with it ” (Avery and Ehrlich 1992:42). The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the working mechanism of flapping and rehabilitate its pronunciation difficulty by a sample lessons operated by the audio-articulation method