Speech in Action

Hi Dharmendra

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.

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

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):

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

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.