Speech in Action

Ying is a learner who kept a diary about her experiences while she was learning to listen. She wrote:

‘I believe I need to learn what the word sounds like when it is used in the sentence. Because sometimes when a familiar word is used in a sentence, I couldn’t catch it. Maybe it changes somewhere when it is used in a sentence’ (Goh 1997, p. 366).

Ying’s dilemma (= a situation which makes problems) is that she fails to recognise familiar words when she hears them. She believes that she needs to learn something: how words change their soundshape when they occur in a sentence. Ying is describing clearly a problem that teachers are largely unaware of: the soundshapes of words do change according to their relationships to other words. Ying uses familiar terms ‘words’ and ‘sentences': my view is that we need to move away from these terms, and the concepts they represent, if we are to help learners like Ying.

The following four speech units, taken from Brazil (1994, chapter 1) illustrate Ying’s dilemma. In each of them, the word ‘where’ occurs, and it sounds different each time. Click the speaker icons on the left to hear the whole speech unit, click the speaker icons on the right to hear the word ‘where’ extracted from each speech unit. For speech units 03 and 04 there are additional icons where you can hear ‘where she’d’ and ‘where there were’. Note the different pronunciations of ‘where’

01 // but i WASn't sure WHERE //
02 // WHERE MARket street was //
03 // where she'd SAID //
04 // where there were STREET LIGHTS //

In 01 'where' sounds close to the citation form that you would find in the dictionary; in 02 it is shorter and the vowel is less of a diphthong; in 03 and 04 both 'wheres' sound like the short sharp bleat of a strangled lamb. What these four examples show, quite neatly, is that words do indeed change their shape according to their relationship to other words.

In 01, 'where' is prominent, tonic (falling tone) and it occurs before a pause: these are optimal conditions for the production of a citation form, but are relatively rare in everyday speech.

In 02, 'where' is prominent early in the speech unit, and is therefore not before a pause, it is therefore shorter than in 01.

In 03 and 04 'where' is non-prominent, early in the speech unit, therefore not before a pause, it is even shorter.

Position in the speech unit, and choice by the speaker of whether or not to make a word prominent, are therefore key determinants of the sound shapes of any word.

You might argue that this kind of thing only happens to function words. But you would be wrong. See Favourite Speech units no. 5.

Brazil, D. (1994). Pronunciation for Advanced Learners of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Goh, C. (1997). Metacognitive awareness and second language listeners. ELT Journal 51(4), 361-369