Syllables and Stress Practice Words

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Free, printable resource from San Diego Voice and Accent [email protected] Syllables and Stress Spoken English has a rhythm to it. Some words are said louder and longer, and some words are said softer and shorter, and it is this back-and-forth between louder words, softer words, and longer words, shorter words, that gives English its rhythm. But where does this rhythm come from? The rhythm comes from syllable stress. Syllables are what give a word its beat. Take for example the word microwave. When you say this word, you should feel that it has three beats, and you should be able to clap out to the beat. Mi-cro-wave. Mi-cro-wave. Microwave has three syllables, so there are three beats in this word. In spoken English, one syllable is always going to receive the most stress compared to the other syllables in the word. In microwave, the first syllable MI has the most stress. MI-cro-wave. MI-cro-wave. We call that the primary stress. Look at microwave again, but now I’ll use the syllables DA-da in place of the actual word. DA is for stressed syllables, and da is for unstressed syllables. MI-cro-wave DA-da-da Let’s practice counting syllables and identifying the primary stress in some common words in English. Practice Words: Word Number of Stress pattern DA-da syllables transcription the 1 THE DA after 2 AF-ter DA-da Free, printable resource from San Diego Voice and Accent [email protected] because 2 be-CAUSE da-DA again 2 a-GAIN da-DA consistent 3 con-SIS-tent da-DA-da understand 3 un-der-STAND da-da-DA recognize 3 RE-cog-nize DA-da-da economy 4 e-CO-no-my da-DA-da-da education 4 ed-u-CA-tion da-da-DA-da information 4 in-for-MA-tion da-da-DA-da imagination 5 i-ma-gi-NA-tion da-da-da-DA-da occasionally 5 o-CCA-sion-a-lly da-DA-da-da-da recommendation 5 re-co-men-DA-tion da-da-da-DA-da Thanks for reading! Make sure you watch the video that goes along with this resource (Syllables and Stress) and contact me if you have any questions! Happy studying! Julie [email protected] 530-713-3211 .

Copy Link

Recommended publications

Part 1: Introduction to The
PREVIEW OF THE IPA HANDBOOK Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A guide to the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet PARTI Introduction to the IPA 1. What is the International Phonetic Alphabet? The aim of the International Phonetic Association is to promote the scientific study of phonetics and the various practical applications of that science. For both these it is necessary to have a consistent way of representing the sounds of language in written form. From its foundation in 1886 the Association has been concerned to develop a system of notation which would be convenient to use, but comprehensive enough to cope with the wide variety of sounds found in the languages of the world; and to encourage the use of thjs notation as widely as possible among those concerned with language. The system is generally known as the International Phonetic Alphabet. Both the Association and its Alphabet are widely referred to by the abbreviation IPA, but here 'IPA' will be used only for the Alphabet. The IPA is based on the Roman alphabet, which has the advantage of being widely familiar, but also includes letters and additional symbols from a variety of other sources. These additions are necessary because the variety of sounds in languages is much greater than the number of letters in the Roman alphabet. The use of sequences of phonetic symbols to represent speech is known as transcription. The IPA can be used for many different purposes. For instance, it can be used as a way to show pronunciation in a dictionary, to record a language in linguistic fieldwork, to form the basis of a writing system for a language, or to annotate acoustic and other displays in the analysis of speech.
[Show full text]
An Instrumental Study of Vowel Reduction and Stress Placement in Spanish-Accented English
SSLA. 11. 35-62. Printed in the United States of America. -------- -.- AN INSTRUMENTAL STUDY OF VOWEL REDUCTION AND STRESS PLACEMENT IN SPANISH-ACCENTED ENGLISH James Emil Flege Ocke-Schwen Bohn University of Alabama, Birmingham Morphophonological alternations in English words such as able versus ability involve changes in both stress and vowel quality. This study examined how native speakers of Spanish and English produced four such morphologically related English word pairs. Degree of stress and vowel quality was assessed auditorily and instrumentally. Stress placement generally seemed to constitute less of a learning problem for the native Spanish speakers than vowel reduction. The results suggest that Englishlike stress placement is acquired earlier than vowel reduction and that the ability to unstress vowels is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for vowel reduction. The magnitude of stress and vowel quality differences for the four word pairs suggests that L2 learners acquire stress placement and vowel reduction in English on a word-by-word basis. INTRODUCTION Many second language (12) learners retain a foreign accent long after achieving proficiency in other aspects of 12 production. A foreign accent may result from segmental substitutions of replica for model sounds as well as non-12-like rhythmic, intonational, and stress patterns (Flege, )984). Even though it is generally agreed that This study was supported by NIH grant NS20963-04. The authors would like to thank Sherry Sutphin for fabricating the pseudopalates and for data analysis. ~ 1969 Cambridge Univenity Press OZ7Z·Z63 1/69 $5.00 + .00 3S 36 James Emil Flege and Ocke-Schwen Bohn the use of full instead of reduced vowels in unstressed syllables may contribute impor• tantly to foreign accent and this phenomenon "is extremely typical" (Hammond, 1986) in Spanish-accented English, to our knowledge it has never been examined empirically.
[Show full text]
Tone, Intonation, Stress and Duration in Navajo
Tone, intonation, stress and duration in Navajo Item Type text; Article Authors Kidder, Emily Publisher University of Arizona Linguistics Circle (Tucson, Arizona) Journal Coyote Papers: Working Papers in Linguistics, Linguistic Theory at the University of Arizona Rights http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ Download date 25/09/2021 21:50:14 Item License Copyright © is held by the author(s). Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/126405 Tone, Intonation, Stress and Duration in Navajo Emily Kidder University of Arizona Abstract 1 Introduction The phonological categories of tone, stress, duration and intonation interact in interesting and complex ways in the world’s languages. One reason for this is that they all use the phonetic cues of pitch and duration in diﬀerent ways in order to be understood as phonologically meaningful. The Navajo language has unique prosodic characteristics that make it particularly valuable for the study of how pitch and duration interact on a phonological level. Navajo is a tonal language, and also has phonemic length, however, the existence of prosodic elements such as intonation and stress have been a matter of debate among scholars (De Jong and McDonough, 1993; McDonough, 1999). In- tonation has been assumed to be a universal characteristic, present in tonal and non-tonal languages alike, though evidence to the contrary has been pre- sented (Connell and Ladd, 1990; Laniran, 1992; McDonough, 2002). Stress or accent is similarly thought to be a manifested on some level in all lan- guages, even when it is not used contrastively (Hayes, 1995). In this paper I explore the evidence available for whether or not stress and intonation exists in Navajo.
[Show full text]
Pronunciation Notes (PDF)
Pronunciation Notes for the Pronouncing Dictionary of the Supreme Court of the United States Jason A. Zentz IPA Garner Examples IPA Garner Examples p p pie, pea i ee heed, bead b b by, bee ɪ i hid, bid t t tie, tea eɪ ay hate, bait d d die, D ɛ e head, bed k k buckeye, key æ a had, bad ɡ g guy, foggy ɑ ah ha, baa ʔ (none)1 uh-uh, Hawaiʻi ɑ ah2 hot, body tʃ ch chai, cheetah ɔ aw hawed, bawd dʒ j jive, G oʊ oh hoed, bode f f fie, fee ʊ uu hood, book v v vie, V u oo whoʼd, booed θ th thigh, theme ə ə ahead, aboard ð th thy, thee ʌ ə Hudson, bud s s sigh, sea aɪ ɪ hide, bide z z Zaire, Z aʊ ow howʼd, bowed ʃ sh shy, she ɔɪ oi ahoy, boy ʒ zh vision, regime iɹ eer here, beard χ kh3 chutzpah ɛɹ air hair, bared h h high, he ɑɹ ahr hard, bard m m my, me ɔɹ or horde, board n n nigh, knee uɹ oor poor, boor ŋ ng rang, clingy əɹ ər herd, bird, over l l lie, Lee ɹ r rye, reed w w wide, we hw hw why, which j y yes, ye 1 For Americanized pronunciations that include the glottal stop, it is represented in our IPA transcriptions but not our Garner transcriptions. 2 Garner (2009a,b, 2011) distinguishes between IPA /ɑ/ and /ɒ/, giving /ah/ for the former and /o/ for the latter.
[Show full text]
49 Stress-Timed Vs. Syllable- Timed Languages
TBC_049.qxd 7/13/10 19:21 Page 1 49 Stress-timed vs. Syllable- timed Languages Marina Nespor Mohinish Shukla Jacques Mehler 1Introduction Rhythm characterizes most natural phenomena: heartbeats have a rhythmic organization, and so do the waves of the sea, the alternation of day and night, and bird songs. Language is yet another natural phenomenon that is charac- terized by rhythm. What is rhythm? Is it possible to give a general enough definition of rhythm to include all the phenomena we just mentioned? The origin of the word rhythm is the Greek word osh[óp, derived from the verb oeí, which means ‘to flow’. We could say that rhythm determines the flow of different phenomena. Plato (The Laws, book II: 93) gave a very general – and in our opinion the most beautiful – definition of rhythm: “rhythm is order in movement.” In order to under- stand how rhythm is instantiated in different natural phenomena, including language, it is necessary to discover the elements responsible for it in each single case. Thus the question we address is: which elements establish order in linguistic rhythm, i.e. in the flow of speech? 2The rhythmic hierarchy: Rhythm as alternation Rhythm is hierarchical in nature in language, as it is in music. According to the metrical grid theory, i.e. the representation of linguistic rhythm within Generative Grammar (cf., amongst others, Liberman & Prince 1977; Prince 1983; Nespor & Vogel 1989; chapter 43: representations of word stress), the element that “establishes order” in the flow of speech is stress: universally, stressed and unstressed positions alternate at different levels of the hierarchy (see chapter 40: stress: phonotactic and phonetic evidence).
[Show full text]
Stress Chapter
Word stress in the languages of the Caucasus1 Lena Borise 1. Introduction Languages of the Caucasus exhibit impressive diversity when it comes to word stress. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the stress systems in North-West Caucasian (henceforth NWC), Nakh-Dagestanian (ND), and Kartvelian languages, as well as the larger Indo-European (IE) languages of the area, Ossetic and (Eastern) Armenian. For most of these languages, stress facts have only been partially described and analyzed, which raises the question about whether the available data can be used in more theoretically-oriented studies; cf. de Lacy (2014). Instrumental studies are not numerous either. Therefore, the current chapter relies mainly on impressionistic observations, and reflects the state of the art in the study of stress in these languages: there are still more questions than answers. The hope is that the present summary of the existing research can serve as a starting point for future investigations. This chapter is structured as follows. Section 2 describes languages that have free stress placement – i.e., languages in which stress placement is not predicted by phonological or morphological factors. Section 3 describes languages with fixed stress. These categories are not mutually exclusive, however. The classification of stress systems is best thought of as a continuum, with fixed stress and free stress languages as the two extremes, and most languages falling in the space between them. Many languages with fixed stress allow for exceptions based on certain phonological and/or morphological factors, so that often no firm line can be drawn between, e.g., languages with fixed stress that contain numerous morphologically conditioned exceptions (cf.
[Show full text]
What in the World Do We Know About Word Stress? a Review of What It Is and How to Teach It
What in the world do we know about word stress? A review of what it is and how to teach it by Martin Checklin Abstract Word stress is an imperative part of English language learning, both in terms of comprehending spoken English and increasing oral intelligibility. However, it can often be a difficult area for learners of English to master successfully and one which is problematic for teachers of pronunciation to embrace in their teaching. This literature review presents an overview of what word stress is, its importance in intelligibility, and specific issues which certain language background groups encounter. Additionally, the review discusses and critiques the teaching methods of word stress found in commercially-produced textbooks and thus provides theoretical knowledge for teachers to incorporate into their classroom teaching. Recommendations for further research into word stress acquisition are outlined. Introduction As pronunciation teaching has become more focused on increasing intelligibility rather than emulating a ‘native-like’ accent (Levis, 2005), faulty production of word stress has been found to significantly decrease intelligibility (Cutler & Clifton, 1984; Gallego, 1990; Bond, 1999; Field, 2005). This literature review presents an overview of what word stress is, its relationship with intelligibility and particular problems that students from certain language backgrounds might encounter. In addition, the paper discusses and critiques some of the methods for teaching word stress found in teaching resources in order to provide pronunciation teachers with theoretical knowledge which they can incorporate into their classroom practice. English word stress English, along with other languages such as Russian and Arabic, belongs to a group of languages which are described as ‘stress-timed’ languages (Abercrombie, 1967).
[Show full text]
On Recent Claims About Stress and Tone
On recent claims about stress and tone in Beijing Mandarin∗ François DELL D'après Duanmu (2000), l'accentuation du chinois standard est caractérisée par des pieds accentuels à tête initiale. Parmi les arguments que l'auteur présente en faveur de cette thèse, certains relèvent de la phonologie, et d'autres de la morpho-syntaxe. Nous passons en revue les arguments phonologiques et nous concluons qu'aucun n'emporte la conviction. Mots clé : Mandarin, accentuation, sandhi tonal, domaine cyclique. According to Duanmu (2000), stress in Standard Chinese is characterized by left-headed feet. This review examines the phonological arguments given in the book supporting this claim. The conclusion is that the book fails to present any solid phonological evidence in favor of left-headed stress feet in Standard Chinese. Key words : Mandarin, stress, tone sandhi, cyclic domain. ∗ I thank Monique Hoa and Xu Dan for helping me with some of the examples, and Hilary Chappell for reviewing my English. I owe a special debt to San Duanmu, whose comments on an earlier draft have led to significant improvements. Any faults remaining are my sole responsibility. Cahiers de Linguistique – Asie Orientale 33(1): 33-63 (2004) © CRLAO-EHESS 54, Bd Raspail 75006 Paris 0153-3320/2004/033-33 34 Dell F. / Cahiers de Linguistique – Asie Orientale 33(2004) 33-63 1. INTRODUCTION The syntax-phonology interface has been an area of intense theoretical interest for several decades, and Chinese has come to occupy a prominent place in that line of research, owing to important work on tone sandhi in the Xiamen and Shanghai dialects.1 As for the Beijing dialect, it is still debatable what it can teach us about the interaction between syntax and phonology.
[Show full text]
Stress Reduction
N O R T H C A ROLINA FARMWORKER HEALTH MODULES Stress Reduction N O R T H C A ROLINA FARMWORKER HEALTH MODULES STRESS REDUCTION Self-Assessment/Pre-Test (to be completed before reading stress reduction content) 1. What are some physical signs that someone might be experiencing stress? a. headaches b. chest pain c. breakouts on skin (acne) d. all of the above 2. Which of the following is not an example of a typical behavioral change that may result from stress? a. frequent outbursts b. nausea c. increased alcohol consumption d. eating less e. eating more 3. It’s possible that a person might confuse their symptoms of stress with symptoms of the common cold or flu. a. true b. false 4. Of the following situations, when should a person seek medical attention? a. the source of stress can’t be identified b. a physical problem or untreated illness is causing stress c. a person has thoughts or acts of hurting his/herself or others d. all of the above 5. Which of the following is not a healthy way to respond to stress? a. have three alcoholic drinks before going to bed b. exercise regularly c. talk to someone you trust d. practice deep breathing techniques e. a, b and c 6. What is decompression? a. pressing your feet against a hard surface like the floor or wall b. engaging in healthy activities that release stress and/or bring about relaxation c. releasing stress by abusing alcohol or drugs d. both b and c are examples of things people do to decompress NORTH CAROLINA FARMWORKER HEALTH MODULES Self assessment/Pre-test: Stress reduction – 2 7.
[Show full text]
English Words with Phonetic Transcription Pdf
English Words With Phonetic Transcription Pdf Unfortunate Timothee quells definably. Which Dru necrotize so waitingly that Stanislaw gathers her rollneck? Spud locates his incidentals homologised despondingly, but letter-perfect Woodie never hogtied so descriptively. Taipei: American Magazine Center. They may not represent your particular vowel set. Throughout several centuries English scholars have advocated spelling reform. Take some time to examine the IPA chart. Many writers stress that phonetic specification of RP is central to its definition. When a voiceless sound is followed by a voiced sound such as a vowel, the vocal cords must close so they can vibrate. The Origins and Development of the English Languageed. If the symbol schwa is inserted, the syllabic mark will no longer be used, as the consonants lose their syllabicity, cf. Letters may be continued for use of the weak form a number of air escapes through the students to transcribe clients with it only phonemes for words with phonetic transcription. This is what is appropriate for dictionaries and language textbooks. The details of this process, however, are not equally clear in all cases. Practical Phonetics and Phonology. Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Longman, etc. The onset of a syllable consists of all the consonants that precede a that the onset may consist of either a single consonant or a In syllables with no initial consonant, there would be no onset. English, not just the phonemic ones. There were a lot of people in the room who wanted to stay. If two sounds are simply characteristic of a language, but are never used to distinguish one meaning from another, they are phones, but they are not phonemes.
[Show full text]
1 Stress and Syllable Structure in English
1 Stress and Syllable Structure in English: Approaches to Phonological Variations* San Duanmu, Hyo-Young Kim, and Nathan Stiennon University of Michigan Abstract 1. What is phonological variation? We use phonological variation to refer to alternative forms that can be used for more or less similar purposes. For example, in English a word made of CVCVCV can have stress on the first syllable, as in Canada, or on the second syllable, as in banana. There is no reason why the stress pattern could not have been the other way round, i.e. for Canada to have stress on the second syllable and for banana to have stress on the first. Nor is there any reason why stress in such words cannot be all on the first syllable, or all on the second. English just happens to use both forms. Similarly, an English word can be VC, such as Ann, CVC, such as sit, or CCCVC, such as split. There is no reason why a word must use one or another form and English just happens to use all those forms. Besides variations within a language, there are also variations across different languages. For example, before the nuclear vowel Standard Chinese allows CG- but not CC-, whereas English allows both CG- and CC-. Similarly, Standard Chinese only allows [–n] and [–ŋ] after the nuclear vowel, whereas English allows many more consonants. * Portions of this work were presented at University of Michigan in 2002, the Second North American Phonology Conference in 2002, Wayne State University in 2004, Peking University in 2004, the 10th Mid- Continental Workshop on Phonology in 2004, and National Chengchi University, Taipei, in 2005.
[Show full text]
Stress and Accent in Language Production and Under- Standing1
ANNE CUTLER Stress and Accent in Language Production and Under standing1 Introduction The central thesis of this paper is that die psycholinguistic evidence on the perception of prosodic structure in language understanding, and on the determination of prosodic structure in language production, converge to show two aspects of the same phenomenon. That is to say, the perceptual and production evidence together enable us to construct a picture of our mental representation of the role of prosody in language, and the way this knowledge is expressed in language use. Rather than attempt to cover all aspects of prosodic structure, and all the relevant evidence on how each type of prosodic variation is produced and perceived, this chapter will concentrate on two phenomena only: stress and accent. Stress and accent each concern the relative prominence of one syllable in comparison with others; but as defined here, stress is a property of words, accent of sentences (or utterances). The two are not independent in the utterance itself. For instance, accent is usually realised on a syllable which is marked for stress (although some exceptions to this generalisation will be discussed below). However, at a more abstract level of linguistic processing the two phenomena are quite distinct and are driven by totally independent processes. (For a compre hensive discussion of the independence yet interaction of accent and stress, though one in a theoretical framework different from that devel oped in the present paper, see Jassem & Gibbon, 1980.) The evidence to be cited below, and hence the theoretical conclusions to be drawn, refer exclusively to English; and the mental representations of prosodic struc ture which are inferred are therefore presumably those of English speak ers only and are by no means necessarily shared by speakers of other lan guages in which word stress and sentence accent are differently expressed or not expressed at all.
[Show full text]