Pronunciationi practice - going beyond the sound segmentsMiriam,

I met you, I think at TESOL, years ago. Greetings from Texas. You talk about "can" and "can't."  I'm working on a new classification system for final consonant clusters and think that the last sound in "can't", in normal speech,  is not really a cluster. Try this; the final sound in "can't" is really a single consonant, only confused by the writing system. I would describe it as a "voiced alveolar nasal stop." Does that make sense?  If "can" precedes a verb in a statement, the reduction of the vowel is real.  However, if you compare "can" and "can't" side by side, retaining the full identity of the vowel, "can" is about three times longer than can't, because of the voiceless /t/ stop. What about "lamb" and "lamp"? I would describe the final consonant in "lamb" as a voiced bilabial nasal (continuant) and the final consonant in "lamp" as a voiced bilabial nasal stop. Dark would be a voiced alveolar retroflex stop, etc. I'm sorry that this is the last day! If students can learn to hear syllable length, the problem can be solved quickly. My ESL students can identify syllable length most of the time in new words.   

Cheers,  Ted
www.tedklein-ESL.com 
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Miriam Burt 
  To: englishlanguage at nifl.gov 
  Sent: Friday, December 14, 2007 3:08 PM
  Subject: [EnglishLanguage 2015] Pronunciationi practice - going beyond thesound segments


  Hello, everyone, 
  I’ve been enjoying the conversation this week and find I have to weigh in the pronunciation discussion from a couple of days ago.

  Practicing the discrete sounds (or segments) of English (or any language) has value, but of greater value is understanding and being able to correctly use the system in which the individual sounds function.

  You can practice the difference between "can" and "can't" for hours exhorting your students to pronounce the final "t"... but that's not the issue. The issue is stress-- both word stress and sentence stress: When the modal "can" precedes a verb (e.g., swim, drive, walk, talk, answer emails and so on) it is generally NOT stressed and so the pronunciation of the vowel is not the /ǽ/ of the “can’t” (which being a negative modal, generally is stressed in a sentence), but rather more of a schwa an /Ə/ or an /I/, a sound closer to the “i” in “fin” or the “u” in “run” than the “a” in “fan.”

  On the other hand, if someone comments that you can’t swim, and you respond to them saying that you can, in fact swim, then in your response the “a” in can will be stressed – and it will sound more like the “a” in “fan.” (and in "can't")

  Furthermore, in the so-called “short answer (Yes, I can) the modal is stressed and the vowel sound is /æ/. However, even in that case, the difference between “can” and “can’t” still doesn’t need to be what the meaning of the sentence hangs on, because one has the context words, “no” and “yes” at the beginning of the short answer to deliver meaning as well.

  Interestingly, one of this week's experts, MaryAnn Florez, has written about the issue of the importance of these suprasegmental features of pronunciation in a digest: 

  She writes: 
  “Two groups of features are involved in pronunciation: segmentals and suprasegmentals. Segmentals are the basic inventory of distinctive sounds and the way that they combine to form a spoken language. In the case of North American English, this inventory is comprised of 40 phonemes (15 vowels and 25 consonants), which are the basic sounds that serve to distinguish words from one another. Pronunciation instruction has often concentrated on the mastery of segmentals through discrimination and production of target sounds via drills consisting of minimal pairs like /bæd/-/bæt/ or /sIt/-/sît/.

  Suprasegmentals transcend the level of individual sound production. They extend across segmentals and are often produced unconsciously by native speakers. Since suprasegmental elements provide crucial context and support (they determine meaning) for segmental production, they are assuming a more prominent place in pronunciation instruction (Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin, 1996; Gilbert, 1990; Morley, 1991). Suprasegmentals include the following: 

  · stress-a combination of length, loudness, and pitch applied to syllables in a word (e.g., Happy, FOOTball); 
  · rhythm-the regular, patterned beat of stressed and unstressed syllables and pauses (e.g., with weak syllables in lower case and stressed syllables in upper case: they WANT to GO Later.); 

  · adjustments in connected speech-modifications of sounds within and between words in streams of speech (e.g., "ask him," /æsk hIm/ becomes /æs kIm/); 

  · prominence-speaker's act of highlighting words to emphasize meaning or intent (e.g., Give me the BLUE one. (not the yellow one); and 

  · intonation-the rising and falling of voice pitch across phrases and sentences (e.g., Are you REAdy?)." 

  To read the digest, Improving Adult ESL Learners' Pronunciation Skills,  (National Center for ESL Literacy Education, Washington, DC, December, 1998), go to http://www.cal.org/caela/esl_resources/digests/Pronun.html\

  Best, 
  Miriam 
  ******* 
  Miriam Burt 
  Center for Adult English Language Acquisition 
  Center for Applied Linguistics 
  4646 40th Street NW 
  Washington, DC 20016 
  (202) 362-0700, 
  (202) 363-7204 (fax) 
  mburt at cal.org (email) 



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