This document provides an introduction to sounds, stress, and intonation in speech. It discusses phonemes as the smallest units of sound in a language. It describes the difference between sounds and phonemes, and explains stress and intonation patterns in words and sentences. The document also introduces the International Phonetic Alphabet and discusses organs of speech and the speech mechanism.

1. S. Mohan Raj
Ph.D Research Scholar
VIT, Vellore.
9751660760
rajmohan251@gmail.com
Introduction
to sounds,
stress and
intonation

2. Speech sounds are also called as phonemes.
Vibrations that travel through the air or another medium can be heard when they
reach a person’s or animal’s ear.
The Sound produced by continuous and regular vibrations, as opposed to noise.
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Sound and Noise
Sound (=phone) is a vibration or wave caused by an object.
This definition underlines acoustics and physical characteristics of sounds of speech.
Sounds are instances of phonemes in real speech.
Put it simply, sounds are everything we hear with our ears.

3. Phonemes (speech sounds) are represented in writing by placing the letter(s) used
to represent the sound between slashes — so, for example the sound that you say
at the beginning of the word pot is represented by /p/.
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A Phoneme (Gr. phone ”Sound, voice”) is the smallest contrastive unit of language.
Sound - Phoneme
A phoneme is the smallest part of spoken language that makes a difference in meaning.
Sounds of English
The English alphabet has 26 letters that are used individually in various
combinations to represent 44 different speech sounds.

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The English alphabet (26 letters), made up of consonants and vowels.
There are five vowels (a,e,i,o,u) and the rest are all consonants.
In English, the pronunciation of words centres upon syllables.
A syllable is a unit of pronunciation which has one vowel sound, with or without surrounding
consonants, forming a word. Ex. 2 syllables in wa/ter and 3 in in/fer/no.
The sounds of spoken language are known as phonemes.
Thus, /water/ has 2 syllables but 4 phonemes: w/a/t/er
/inferno/ has 3 syllables but 7 phonemes: i/n/f/e/r/n/o.
The written equivalent of sounds or phonemes are known as graphemes, and the English
alphabet made up of the 26 letters is called the orthographic alphabet.
The English Alphabet

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In order to study the sounds of English, linguists devised an alphabet which
contains symbols to capture all possible sounds in English, called the
International Phonetic Alphabet.

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The standard form of spoken English or the reference accent
for English is known as Received Pronunciation (RP).
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabet of phonetic
notation designed to capture all the different ways words in English can be
pronounced, based on the Latin alphabet.
It was designed by the International Phonetic Association (1999) as a
standardised system for representing sounds of oral language.

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English Alphabets with Phonetic pronunciation

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Organs of Speech

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Speech Mechanism

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Word Stress Pattern in English Words
Word stress and syllables are the next important things to learn about
which is related to English pronunciation and accent.
Word Stress is also sometimes referred to as Word Accent.
Syllables
A syllable is a word, or part of a word, which contains a single vowel sound.
It is a single unit of speech.
Each word contains one syllable or more.
The syllable which is pronounced with greater force is called the stressed syllable.
One Syllable
Words with a single syllable: pen, man, pig, cup, hat.
In English, a vowel sound can be made of more than one vowel letter.
The following words have a single syllable:
feet, moon, cake, have, break, bought
All of these words contain only one vowel sound, and therefore a single syllable.

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Two Syllables
A word can have more than one syllable.
garden: gar-den , hotel: ho-tel , consist: con-sist, object: ob-ject, focus: fo-cus
Three Syllables
Examples of words with three syllables.
September: sep-tem-ber , department: de-part-ment telephone: te-le-phone ,camera:
ca-mer-a, Saturday: sa-tur-day, hamburger: ham-bur-ger , vitamin: vi-ta-min
Four Syllables
Examples of words with four syllables.
kindergarten: kin-der-gar-ten information: in-for-ma-tion ,January: ja-nu-ar-y,
American: A-mer-i-can, discovery: di-sco-ver-y

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX1rrFh4OZw
Read for Rules of Word Stress in English at:
https://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation/word-stress-2.htm
Few things to remember:
1. A word can only have one stress.
2. In a very long word you can have secondary stress but it is always much smaller stress.
3. Only vowels are stressed, not consonants. The vowels in English are a, e, i, o, and u.
The consonants are all the other letters.

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Stress is a suprasegmentals feature
Rhythm & intonation
Rhythm (suprasegmental stress patterns) (time)
a. The relationship between stressed and unstressed syllables
b. Patterns of a combination of stressed and unstressed syllables
c. The liaison or other phonological structures (assimilation, deletion, etc.)
Intonation (suprasegmental melody) (time + space)
a. Pitch contours; break indexes (time)
b. The intonation units; the pitch accent (time + space)
All languages have their distinct melody or music.
This music of language is called intonation.
Falling and Rising are the two intonation patterns.
Three main patterns of intonation are:
Falling
Rising and
Fall-rise.

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Traditional intonation frameworks

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(Celce Mercia, et. al., 1996. Teaching Pronunciation)

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Strong and Weak forms
Weak forms are syllable sounds that become unstressed in connected speech, it is
often pronounced as a Schwa.
Strong and weak syllables are described in terms of stress.
Strong syllables are stressed and weak syllables are unstressed.
a /ə/ I’ve got a new dress.
am /əm/ /m/ I’m not going home, am I?
an /ən/ That’s an apple
and /ənd/ /ən/ We need some salt and pepper.
any /ənɪ/ Do you have any money?
are /ə/ They are at school just now.
as /əz/ It was as big as an elephant.
at /ət/ She works at night.
be /bɪ/ /bi/ He’s going to be late.
been /bɪn/ Have you been here long?
but /bət/ The food is good but the service is terrible.

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Voice Modulation
It is a change in stress, pitch, loneliness, or tone of the voice and
inflexion of the voice.
Components of Voice Modulation
1. Pace or Speech speed
2. Pitch or depth of voice
3. Pause
4. Power
5. Volume
6. Emphasis
7. Inflexion – ups and downs

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https://blogonlinguistics.wordpress.com/2013/10/12/phoneme-sound-allophone-phone/
https://www.readingrockets.org/teaching/reading101-course/modules/sounds-speech/sounds-speech-depth
https://www.dvusd.org/cms/lib/AZ01901092/Centricity/Domain/3795/Sound_Spelling_Chart.pdf
https://www2.aston.ac.uk/lss/research/lss-research/ccisc/discourse-and-culture/west-midlands-english-speech-and-
society/sounds-of-english
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX1rrFh4OZw
https://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation/word-stress-2.htm
Reference

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