UNIVERSIDAD DE GUANAJUATO

Licenciatura en Enseñanza del Inglés

VOCBULARY AND PRONUNCATION

CONCEPTS PROFESOR ALINE RODDAM

Autor: Eduardo Hernández Rangel

Contenido

PROBLEMS AREAS FOR SPANISH SPEAKERS 1EXAMPLES. SOME PROBLEMS WITH ENGLISH LEARNERS. 1

MINIMAL PAIRS 2EXAMPLES OF MINIMAL PAIRS 2

STRESS AND INTONATION 3UNDERSTANDING SYLLABLES 3

EXAMPLES 4INTONATION4

EXAMPLES 4PHONOLOGY 5

THE PHYSICS AND PHYSIOLOGY OF SPEECH 5Bibliografía 6

Problems areas for Spanish speakers

Spanish speaker uses the Latin alphabet and the vowels can take an acute accent

besides there is the additional letter ñ.

When spelling English words or writing

them from the teacher's dictation,

beginning Spanish students may make

mistakes with the English vowels a, e, i.

The consonants h, j, r, y may also cause

trouble.

In Spanish the vowel ‘i’ is pronounced /i/, so Spanish speakers usually confuse the

English vowel ‘e’ with ‘i’ because of the way it is pronounced in Spanish.

While Spanish speakers do not have major difficulties with the writing the alphabet, they

find English spelling to be “catastrophic” compared to spanish spelling where each letter

represents a single sound. In contrast, English spelling is full of inconsistencies.

For example, sometimes the same sound is spelled using different letters, as in sea,

see, scene, receive, and thief.

Producing English consonant sounds is not so problematic for many Spanish learners,

but difficult enough! They may have problems in the following aspects:

Examples. Some problems with English learners.

Failure to pronounce the end consonant accurately or strongly enough;

e.g. cart for the English word card or brish for bridge or thing for think.

Problems with the /v/ in words such as vowel or revive.

Difficulties in sufficently distinguishing words such

as see/she or jeep/sheep/cheap.

The tendency to prefix words beginning with a consonant cluster on s- with an /ε/

sound; so, for example school becomes eschool and strip becomes estrip.

Minimal pairs

It is a set of two or more words that are differentiated by one phoneme and

the varying sound can be either a consonant or a

vowel. Sometimes the same sound can be spelled

differently in different words and the sound is

important, not its spelling.

Minimal pairs can be formed with a sound change

either at the beginning, middle or end of the word.

Examples of minimal pairs

Sip ship chip

Sane Shane chain

Leasing leashing leaching

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Bass bash batch

Cass cash catch

Stress and intonation

In linguistics, stress is the emphasis that may be given to some syllables in a word. The

term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables.

Understanding Syllables

To understand word stress, it helps to understand syllables. Every word is made from

syllables.

Each word has one, two, three or more syllables.

Word Number of syllables

Dog Dog 1

Quiet Qui-et 2

Expensive Ex-pen-sive 3

Interesting In-ter-est-ing 4

Unexceptional Un-ex-cep-tion-al 5

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It would have been logically to have exactly the same loudness and pitch for every

syllable in a word but, human languages have ways to make some syllables more

prominent than others and this is because loudness, pitch and length might be more

prominent in some syllables than others.

Examples

In English, the stress is most dramatically realized on focussed words. For example.

"Is it brunch tomorrow?"

"No, it's dinner tomorrow."

The stress differences between the

syllables of "tomorrow" would be

small in contrast to the syllables of

"dinner", that is the emphasized

word. In these emphasized words,

stressed syllables such as "din" in

"dinner" are louder and longer. They

may also have a different fundamental frequency. Unstressed syllables typically have a

vowel which is closer to a neutral position, while stressed vowels are more fully realized.

Stressed syllables are often perceived as being more forceful than non-stressed

syllables. Research has shown, however, that although dynamic stress is accompanied

by greater respiratory force.

Intonation

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Intonation can reflect the information structure of an utterance, highlighting constituents

of importance and it is called the music of the any utterance for instance most people

are aware that saying ‘This is the London train’ with one intonation is an affirmation but,

with another it is a question. Intonation can be used by a speaker to convey an attitude

such as friendliness, enthusiasm, or hostility; and listeners can use the intonation

phenomena to make inferences about a speaker’s state, including excitement,

depression, and tiredness. Intonation can also, for instance, help to regulate turn-taking

in a conversation process.

Examples

That was a difficult test. - Standard statement

That was a difficult test. - Emphasizes how difficult the test was

There are a specific number of adverbs and modifiers which tend to emphasize

sentences. Ex. Extremely, terribly, completely, utterly, especially…

Phonology

Phonology is the study of the sound system of the English language. This is because all

English language spoken in all over the world has its own variation or pronunciation.

Diachronically and synchronically are properties that English language varies from

dialect to dialect. In general the regional dialects of English are mutually intelligible.

Although there are many dialects of English, the following are usually used as prestige

or standard accents.

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The number of speech sounds in English is different from dialect to dialect, and any

actual number depends on the interpretation of the author The Longman Pronunciation

Dictionary by John C. Wells for example, using symbols of the IPA, denotes 24

consonants and 23 vowels used in Prestige, and two additional consonants and four

additional vowels used in foreign words only. For American general for 25 consonants

and 19 vowels, with one additional consonant and three additional vowels for foreign

words. It varies from the point of view of the researchers. Most common consonant

phonemes.

1. Nasals may be syllabic in unstressed syllables.2. Postalveolar consonants are usually labialized (e.g. [ʃʷ] though this is

rarely transcribed.

3. The voiceless velar fricative and voiceless labiovelar approximant are dialectal. Words with these sounds are pronounced with /k/ and /w/ respectively.

4. Depending on dialect, /r/ may be an alveolar postalveolar.

5. /l/ is velarized in the syllable coda

The physics and physiology of speech

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Human beings are distinguished from the other primates by having the apparatus to

produce sounds of speech and we learn to talk without

ever knowing much about these organs. Language

scientists have a very detailed understanding of how

the human body produces the sounds of speech.

Leaving to one side the vast subject of how we choose

particular utterances in order to identify the sounds we

need, we can think simply of how we use our lungs to

breathe out air, produce vibrations in the larynx and then use our tongue, teeth and lips

to modify the sounds.

Bibliografía

Baker, A. (2002). Introducing English Pronunciation. Ship or Sheep? An Intermediate

pronunciation course. Edinburgh: Cambridge University Press.

Hirst, D. Intonation in British English.

Roach, P. (1991). English Phonetics and Phonology. A practical course (Second edition

ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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