Where does stop collide?

In phonetics, a stop, also called a plosive, is a consonant made by closing the vocal tract completely so that airflow halts and is then released, as in the sounds spelled p, t, and k, and the defining event is the full blockage and release of the airstream. Sweet's 1877 A Handbook of Phonetics set out this class of blocked consonants within a systematic description of speech sounds, and Ladefoged and Maddieson's 1996 The Sounds of the World's Languages gave the modern cross-language survey of how stops are formed and how they vary. The referent is a category of speech sound defined by a momentary closure of the mouth, and it is unrelated to a rank of organ pipes or a codon that halts translation.[1][2]

Unit

One consonant segment defined by a complete closure and release of the vocal tract

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified in transcription and confirmed acoustically by the silent closure and the burst at release on a spectrogram

In molecular biology, a stop codon is a triplet of messenger-RNA bases that signals the end of a protein chain: rather than adding an amino acid it tells the ribosome to release the finished protein, and the three such triplets are UAA, UAG, and UGA. Brenner, Stretton, and Kaplan's 1965 Genetic Code: The 'Nonsense' Triplets for Chain Termination and their Suppression identified the nonsense triplets that terminate a growing protein chain, and Brenner, Barnett, Katz, and Crick's 1967 UGA: A Third Nonsense Triplet in the Genetic Code added UGA as the third. The referent is a coding signal in a strand of RNA that ends translation, and it shares only its four letters with a rank of organ pipes or a blocked consonant in speech.[3][4]

Unit

One triplet of RNA bases (UAA, UAG, or UGA) that ends a protein chain

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Read from the nucleotide sequence and confirmed by where translation stops in the protein product