The three major Phonation types of stops can be analyzed in terms of their voice onset time.
- Simple unaspirated Voiceless Plosive s, sometimes called plosives, have a voice onset time at or near zero, meaning that the voicing of a following Sonorant (such as a vowel) begins at or near to when the stop is released. (An offset of 15 ms on or 30 ms on [k is inaudible, and counts as tenuis.)
- , is commonly called ''voiced aspiration''; in order for the VOT measure to apply to it, VOT needs to be understood as the onset of modal voicing. Of course, an aspirated consonant will not always be followed by a voiced sound, in which case VOT cannot be used to measure it.)
- Voiced plosives have a voice onset time noticeably less than zero, a , meaning the vocal cords start vibrating before the stop is released. With a '''fully voiced stop''', the VOT coincides with the onset of the stop; with a '''partially voiced stop''', such as English d, g in initial position, voicing begins sometime during the closure (occlusion) of the consonant.
- Such full voicing is not the limit of negative VOT. A voicing duration greater than the length of the plosive may manifests itself as Prenasalization . (On the other hand, ''stronger'' rather than longer voicing of an already fully voiced plosive may be realized as Implosion .) In Japanese , a contrast between prenasalized and voiced stops in the northern dialects corresponds to a contrast between voiced and voiceless consonants elsewhere. Throughout much of Melanesia , the voicing contrast is prenasalized ''vs'' voiceless (tenuis), and in many languages prenasalized and modally voiced consonants are Allophone s contrasting with tenuis consonants.
Because neither aspiration nor voicing is absolute, with intermediate degrees of both, the relative terms Fortis And Lenis are often used to describe a binary opposition between a series of consonants with higher (more positive) VOT, defined as ''fortis'', and a second series with lower (more negative) VOT, defined as ''lenis''. Of course, being relative, what fortis and lenis mean in one language will not in general correspond to what they mean in another.
These concepts apply to fricatives and other consonants, but usually aspiration and prenasalization are only relevant for plosives and affricates.
- Taehong Cho and Peter Ladefoged, "Variations and universals in VOT". In ''Fieldwork Studies of Targeted Languages V: UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics'' vol. 95. 1997.
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