What is the linking sound /w/ inserted between a word ending in a vowel and a following word beginning with a vowel called?

• A. intrusive /w/
• B. notional syllabus
• C. hedging
• D. phrase

Answer: (A)

When two words meet and the first ends with a vowel while the next begins with a vowel, speakers sometimes add a semivowel to ease the transition. That added sound is a /w/ and it’s called intrusive /w/. It’s a spoken device, not part of the original words, used to smooth the connection between vowel sounds across word boundaries. The other terms aren’t about this phonetic process—notional syllabus isn’t a term for linking sounds, hedging is a discourse strategy, and phrase is just a syntactic unit. So the linking sound described here is intrusive /w/.