Is he saying [1] or [2] below? You will hear both the original and a slowed down  version.

[1] And he was like ‘Oh I actually didn’t mean to’.

[2] And he was like ‘Oh I totally didn’t mean to’.

Use the player below to hear Randy.

As I said you have good ears! In my enthusiasm for the jungle, I went too far with squeezing the non-prominent syllables ‘would have asked’. I should have stuck to the task of simply demonstrating the absence of the consonant /v/ at the end of ‘would have’, but I ended up changing the /d/ into something more tap-like [ɾ] and even then it is softened so that we end up with something close to [wʊrə]. The schwa (to my ears) is still there. But I agree it is close to inaudible. If I tell myself ‘it is there, listen for it’ and I play the soundfile, I hear it. But if I tell myself ‘it is not there, listen and you will not hear it’ then I don’t hear it. So not hearing it is an entirely reasonable thing!

Here again is the jungle version (as part of the speech unit) from the previous posting.

|| I would have asked HIM || 

in which the words ‘I’ and ‘HIM’ are prominent, and the words ‘would have asked’ are non-prominent.

I woulda asst him

And here is the ‘would have asked’ from that last version:

Would have Jungle

You said

By the way, in the last version, I don’t hear the word ‘have’.at all. It sounds like ‘would asked’.

Here is a version deliberately recorded to exclude the ‘have’ (schwa):
I would asst him
And here is the ‘would have asked’ from this version:
would_asst

There are two very important general points to make about this. First, when we get down to the level of detail that we are now discussing, it is often not possible to be certain about what has been said, and what has not been said.

Second, native and expert speakers of English ‘hear’ an improved version of the stream of speech – we report hearing in the sound substance things that are not there! This is because as we process the sound substance, we subliminally supply extra information from our knowledge and experience of using the language, which we mistakenly believe is there – clearly to be heard – in the sound substance to begin with.

Glad you liked the post. You asked:

By the way, I am not sure how ’I woulda asked you’ be spoken. What will actually happen … between the two vowels underlined in the ‘jungle’ version?

What can happen is that there will be no consonant at all at the end of ‘have’ which will exist only as an almost inaudible schwa and which will glide into the vowel at the start of ‘asked’.

Let me demonstrate. Here is the greenhouse version of ‘Would have asked’

Would have greenhouse

Here is the garden version of ‘Would have asked’ (as in the list of reduced forms)

Would have garden

Here is a jungle version (one of many) as part of the speech unit

|| I would have asked HIM || 

in which the words ‘I’ and ‘HIM’ are prominent, and the words ‘would have asked’ are non-prominent.

I woulda asst him

And here is the ‘would have asked’ from that last version:

Would have Jungle

Image from here

I think the list of reduced forms from Karen Bond is an example of the transition between the greenhouse and the garden. And at least in British English, the majority of them would also have (many) jungle forms, in which consonants would have close to zero realisation.

So a lot of the syllable final consonants in the multi-word, multi-syllable groups would be dropped (or would sound like as if they are dropped). There may be an articulation, but there may be no audible release. Thus ‘might have’ in the jungle can (for me) be ‘my a’ (Maia) in ‘I might have (my a) gone with him’. Remember we are talking about rapid casual speech! Not slow careful speech. So it is helpful to think of ‘might have’ as being non-prominent, between prominences on ‘I’ and ‘GONE’:

|| I might have GONE with him ||

Also, in my view, for deep in the jungle, there is no need for separate rules with the structure ‘x plus consonant’ or ‘x plus vowel’. Thus (in Karen’s garden) ‘would have + consonant’ becomes ‘woulda’ and ‘would have’ + vowel becomes ‘wouldav’ – BUT in the jungle, both could be ‘woulda’: giving ‘I woulda done the dishes’ and ‘I woulda asked you’.

But, remember, the jungle is very unruly, so it is not helpful to think of my examples of what could happen (and what does happen) as ‘rules’. There are very many intermediate forms.

Other Greenhouse/Garden/Jungle sequences:

kind of/kinda/kynuv (or even ‘kye-uv’)

did you/didja/diya

If the idea is that students should learn to ignore bits that don’t matter, is there a case for focusing on them first? For example, “actually” used as a filler, and radically reduced, may become a “noise” like ahiy. We could focus on lots of examples of this word in context, with the hope that in the future, when students hear a noise like that in the flow of speech, they go, “Oh, it’s just one of those meaningless fillers again – I won’t waste time on working out which one it is, and instead keep my attention space open for words which DO matter”.

In other words, could we say (occasionally, at least)  “Listen to every word now so that you don’t have to listen to every word later”?

Absolutely! We need to teach learners about the sound substance of speech – including the different soundshapes that words such as actually (and indeed all words) can have – so that they can use this knowledge in their higher order processing of meaning. They need to become familiar and comfortable with the realities of the stream of speech, rather than rest (as many of them do for too long) unfamiliar and uncomfortable with these realities.

The citation form for ‘actually’ has either three or four syllables, with primary stress on the first syllable:

|ˈæk.ʧu.əl.i| or |ˈæk.ʧul.i|.

Pronunciation dictionaries tell us that two syllable forms are also possible

|ˈæk.ʃli| and |ˈæk.ʃi|

But there’s another variation on the soundshape in unit 03 below:

01 || well i reMEMber ||
02 || something FUNNy happened ||
03 || actualLY ||

In 03 ‘actually’ occurs in a speech unit of its own: it has three syllables, and a tonic prominence with rising tone on the final syllable, even though this is unstressed in the citation form. This is not unusual for ‘actually’ at the end of a clause, before a pause.

Thanks for your valuable contributions yesterday. One of the wonderful things about this discussion is that I have learned so much from other people taking the ideas in different directions. I’ll respond to Robin in a separate posting.

Dharmendra’s extension of the Greenhouse/Garden/Jungle metaphor to the other skills is a very interesting one. But (forgive me) I will stick to the Pronunciation/Listening aspects.

Dharmendra mentioned shuddering ‘at the thought of letting non-native learners make sense from the ‘native speaker jungle’’.

I’d like to make a comment about this, at the risk of being be slightly off the point Dharmendra is making. 

Native speakers have no special privileges in the jungle: they understand the sound substance of the jungles of the groups that they are in regular contact with.
But they  are not aware of the jungle. They don’t see the jungle: they believe that the language they are speaking and hearing is from the greenhouse/garden.

Image from here

Native speakers suffer a particular kind of deafness that I refer to as ‘the blur gap’. This the gap between the native-speaker’s perception, and belief, that full words (e.g. ‘where there were’) were spoken, and the acoustic fact that only small traces (e.g. [we.ðe.wə] ‘weatherwuh’), were present in the sound substance that reaches their ears.

I like to think, but I don’t know, that non-native speakers may actually have a more accurate view of what is present in the sound substance than the native speaker teacher, whose perceptual processes ‘improve’ the sound substance (and they are unaware of the improvement) from jungle state to the garden state.

Image from here

Mark – three lovely questions. My view is that the jungles will resemble each other in certain ways, but will not be entirely similar (they won’t ‘necessarily resemble native speaker jungles’). The processes of squeezing and reduction, and the addition of drafting phenomena will apply for the reasons you suggest (‘the same pressures of communicating-as-we-think (ie “on-line”) under real time constraints’). But the outcomes of those processes may have different characteristics (colouring/flavours/scents) for each language background. A different type of jungle, but still a jungle.

Image from here

It contains a lovely short selection of different speakers, mostly from the UK, but one from the USA (I think) and a couple for whom (it would seem) English is not their first language.

I assume that many of our students would really want to understand these young people, but might not necessarily want to speak like them. What do people think about this?

What do other people find of interest in this video? Do you hear it as ‘garden-like’ or ‘jungle-like’?

Image from here

Hi Sue,

Thanks for your comments on speed of speech, and giving us an insight into the psychological dimension of perception of speed.

There’s so much to say in response, but I’d like to take up something that you say right at the end in your mention of ‘little asides and lead-ins’.

I call these things ‘Drafting phenomena’ – phenomena that we don’t see in prepared speech, or in the written language: filled pauses and lexical filled pauses (level tones on words which have the same ‘buying-time’ function as filled pauses), and inserts such as ‘you know’ and ‘I mean’ and softeners such as ‘kind of like’. Expert listeners don’t notice them (unless they have become an annoyingly frequent habit), it is almost as if they are edited out of the sound track before we begin to process meaning. But they are there, and they contribute to the soundsubstance of spontaneous speech. They are there in the jungle.

For fun, I’d like to suggest taking a textbook sentence (greenhouse/garden) and then roughing it up with a bit of the jungle – these drafting phenomena.

So we could take a sentence from a textbook: ‘It’s the second biggest city in my country I think’, and then put it through the following stages.

Greenhouse/Garden:

|| it’s the SECond BIGgest CITy in my COUNtry i think ||

Or rather, following Mark’s suggestion, in two speech units, one triple prominence, one single:

|| it’s the SECond BIGgest CITy || in my COUNtry i think ||

Then we could demonstrate to students how to rough this up:

01 || UM ||
02 || i mean IT’S ||
03 || you KNOW ||
04 || THE ||
05 || SECond ||
06 || kind of like BIGgest ||
07 || CIty in my COUNtry i think ||

Rough up 1

OR

01 ||  i mean IT’S ||
02 || UM ||
03 || you KNOW ||
04 || it it it’s THE ||
05 || kind of like SECond ||
06 || sort of BIGgest ||
07 || CIty in my COUNtry i think ||

Rough up 2

And then we could get them to rough up sentences of their own choosing – doing garden versions, and then jungle versions, and performing them for their classmates.