Aspiration refers to the quality of some speech sounds to be accompanied by a noisy, turbulent puff of air (e.g., the initial sounds in the words top, post, cake). In the International Phonetic Alphabet, aspiration is represented by adding a diacritic in the form of a superscript h to the written symbol (e.g., [tʰ] [pʰ] [kʰ]).
For the phonemes /t p k/, instructors generally say the aspirated versions when referring to handshapes. For example, "Handshape 5 represents m f tʰ." The spoken representation of /t/ in isolation is usually produced as the aspirated allophones. This can be problemaatic for cuers who incorrectly believe that handshape 5 only refers to that aspirated version.