Suprasegmental features of speech, including stress, tone, and intonation, are crucial for conveying meaning, emotional states, and aesthetic qualities. These rhythmic characteristics differentiate languages and play a role in how speakers express attitudes and structure their utterances. Suprasegmentals influence pronunciation and speech clarity through variations in pitch, loudness, and duration, organizing words into meaningful phrases.

1. ANSHITA SINGH
(ASLP)

2. 
 Suprasegmental are often referred to as the prosodic,
temporal, or patterned features of speech, or as the
“melody” of speech.
 Speech features are rhythmic in that they occur in patterns
which differ from language to language.
 Speech rhythm carries meaning, aids understanding,
conveys emotional state ,and expresses esthetic qualities.
 Suprasegmental features are produced by controlled
changes in voice ,pitch ,loudness and duration.
INTRODUCTION

3. 
 Suprasegmental, in phonetics, a speech feature such
as stress, tone, or word juncture that accompanies or is
added over consonants and vowels; these features are not
limited to single sounds but often extend over syllables,
words, or phrases.
 All of the Suprasegmental features are characterized by
the fact that they must be described in relation to other
items in the same utterance. It is the relative values of the
pitch, length, or degree of stress of an item that are
significant.
CONT….

4. 
 Suprasegmental information applies to several different
linguistic phenomena (including pitch, duration, and
loudness). Suprasegmental are often regarded as the
"musical" aspects of speech.
CONT….

5. 
 The effect of Suprasegmental is easy to illustrate. In
talking to a cat, a dog or a baby, you may adopt a
particular set of Suprasegmental. Often, when doing this,
people adopt a different voice quality, with high
pitch register, and protrude their lips and adopt a tongue
posture where the tongue body is high and front in the
mouth, making the speech sound 'softer.'"
USE OF SUPRASEGMENTALS

6. 
 "Suprasegmental are important for marking all kinds of
meanings, in particular speakers' attitudes or stances to
what they are saying (or the person they are saying it to),
and in marking out how one utterance relates to another
(e.g. a continuation or a disjunction). Both the forms and
functions of Suprasegmental are less tangible than those of
consonants and vowels, and they often do not form
discrete categories."(Richard Ogden, An Introduction to
English Phonetics. Edinburgh University Press, 2009)
CONT….

7. 
 ACCENT-It is produced primarily by increasing voice
intensity and making stressed syllables longer, and also by
some relative change in pitch. Generally Indian Languages
do not use accent.
 STRESS/EMPHASIS-Emphasis refers to the stressing of
a word or words within a phrase. Like accent it is
produced primarily by a combination of increased
intensity and increased duration of syllable within the
stressed word with an accompanying change in voice
frequency {generally high pitch}.
FEATURES

8. 
CONT….
 It does not have a regular pattern peculiar to the language
as accent has, but is used to communicate speaker intent.
Emphasis affects pronunciation of speech sounds, too
 INTONATION- It is refers to variation of pitch in
connected speech as a function of time. Intonation patterns
are described by the direction of pitch change, the degree
of change, and by absolute pitch levels. Patterns of
intonation are governed both by individual characteristics
of speakers and by common usage of the language.

9. 
 PHRASING- A speech phrase is a continuous utterance
bounded by silent intervals. Phrasing organizes words into
groups related to units of thoughts, which help in under-
standing the conversation.
 RATE- Rate refers to the number of syllables uttered per
unit of time. It is affected by both stress and phrasing
patterns.
CONT….

10. 
 www.britannica.com
 www.thoughtco.com
 Fundamentals of Speech and Speech Teaching
REFRENCE