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According to Wikitionary, the american pronounciation of <utter> is [ˈʌɾɚ] in IPA, and <cara> in Spanish is pronounced as [ˈka.ɾa]. According to the IPA these are both the same voiced dental/alveolar/post-alveolar tap, but to me, a native Spanish (Spain) speaker and fluent English speaker, these two sounds are quite distinguishable, they do not sound the same: the first one sounds more like a <d> and the second one much more like a (tapped) <r>. To be more precise, when I pronounce both words and notice where my tongue taps, the first one is dental or alveolar and the second one is further back, post-alveolar.

Do others hear and/or feel the difference too, or am I delusional? If there is indeed a difference, why does the IPA not make a distinction (e.g. between dental and post-alveolar)? Or is there some diacritic that I can use to mark the difference? (If there is such a diacritic, I haven't seen it used ever; the standard transcriptions of these phones are as above.)

Furthermore, to me the <tt> of <utter> sounds the same as the <d> of <cada> in the fast speech of most (castilian) Spanish speakers. But apparently the standard way to transcribe the latter is ['ka.ða], with a voiced dental fricative. To me it both sounds and feels like (in terms of tongue positioning) as a voiced dental tap; the way it is pronounced doesn't give enough time for the supposed frication in [ð] to occur (although I can accept a [ð] if the word is said artificially slow). Now the lack of distinction between dental and post-alveolar voiced taps makes even less sense to me, because I would have to transcribe the Spanish phrase <cada cara> as [ˈka.ɾa ˈka.ɾa], contradicting the fact that the distinction between the <d> in <cada> and the <r> in <cara> is clearly phonemic (since these are different words).

An alternative title for this question (or perhaps a slightly different question) could be: Why does the IPA make no further distinction between dental, alveolar and post-alveolar within voiced taps?

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    The tap represented by ⟨tt⟩ in utter may be slightly postalveolar due to the preceding /ʌ/; in itty-bitty, it’s alveolar. And it’s completely different to the one represented by ⟨d⟩ in cada in Spanish. There’s no tap anywhere in cada; in fast speech, there’s rarely any contact at all between the tip of the tongue and the hard palate. It’s an alveolar approximate, the same way that ⟨v⟩ in cava or ⟨g⟩ in caga is. In some, primarily Latin American, dialects they’re even likely to be so weakly enunciated that they’re elided entirely (though rarely ⟨b⟩ between non-back vowels).
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Jul 13 at 14:59
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    And yes, you can use diacritics if you need to be more precise, but it’s rarely necessary. A dental tap would be [ɾ̪] with the dental diacritic, while a postalveolar one would be [ɾ̠] with the retracted diacritic. Unless you’re specifically talking about the finer points of taps, though, there’s rarely any need, since no language is known to distinguish more than one type of ‘front-of-mouth’ tap.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Jul 13 at 15:07
  • If you say the <d> in <cada> is an alveolar approximate, would you transcribe it as [ɹ] or [ð̞]? Because these sounds (as heard for example here) are not the sound I'm referring to. I can completely assure you that my tongue definitely touches my teeth when I say the <d> in <cada>, and although I don't usually inspect the mouths of my neighbours, I could swear the same of those Spanish speakers around me.
    – Anakhand
    Commented Jul 13 at 15:22
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    Sorry, I meant dental approximant, not alveolar, so [ð̞]. The sound bite on that Wikipedia page is very odd, though. I don’t know if it’s someone who doesn’t speak a language with that sound trying to emulate it, but it doesn’t sound like a normal [ð̞]. It’s very common in most Castilian dialects to lose the connection between the tongue and the teeth completely; I believe it’s much less common in Catalan, and I see your location is in Catalunya, which may be a factor. But even if the contact is very brief, it’s still not a tap if it occurs in a way that allows you to sustain the sound.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Jul 13 at 16:02
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    A tap is a very brief occlusion of the oral tract that prevents air from flowing past it. Fricatives and approximants narrow the oral tract without blocking airflow entirely, which gives a fundamentally different acoustic impression, even if the actual time of contact is very brief. It is possible to make a true dental tap against the bottom of the upper teeth – it sounds very similar to the alveolar tap [ɾ] – but it’s much easier with the alveolar ridge.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Jul 13 at 16:06

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