More about Conversational Speech

Let's examine how English speakers put words together in conversational speech. What you see in print is not what you hear in conversational English. Using authentic speech samples you will become more familiar with natural speech patterns. This will improve your pronunciation and your listening comprehension. Target your listening by noticing the features that you want to improve.

 

Reviewing Reductions and Chunks of Speech

Reductions play a major role in conversational speech rhythm. Unstressed structure words in everyday speech get reduced, or shortened. The more informal the speech, the more reductions you will hear.

• Linking. The reduced words can sound like one long words when you hear the words linked together. You might never know this if you learned English from the printed page, where each word is written separately.

  Example: The cat is hungry ⇒ theCATizHUNgry

• Structure words. When words are linked, unstressed structure words such as you and or are not usually pronounced the way they are spelled. Vowels are reduced to schwa. Sometimes consonants are dropped.

  Example: will he ⇒ Willy