Listener friendly speech

- Let's continue to describe concrete ways that you can get your listeners to focus on the most relevant aspects of your speech to make it more intelligible and comprehensible. Let's start by listing the most important parts of English pronunciation by looking at this pyramid. We'll start at the top with the basics of vowels and consonants, and move through to the more important elements of stress and rhythm, and intonation and inflection at the bottom. Now, this isn't a course on pronunciation, but this lesson explains what English speakers are listening for in English speech, and tips for what you should focus on for listener friendly pronunciation. Let's look at the top of this pyramid and vowels and consonants. They are the foundations of language. They are the sounds that make up individual words. Now, chances are your first language doesn't have the same vowels and consonants, and so you might substitute some sounds from your first language, which might change the meaning of the word in English. For example, I may say sheep when I really mean ship. But native listeners are very good at piecing together the meaning of words through contextual clues that might help. And here are some important things to know about pronunciation. Early changes or substitutions in a word are more likely to cause more misunderstandings. So for example, if I were to hear someone say prut instead of fruit, I might be confused. And there's a reason for this. Our brain functions by listening for cues early on in words and we instantly anticipate what the next sound will be. So if you substitute a different sound early on in the word, it affects all the other choices that my brain anticipates. My brain will think fruit means proof or prove, or maybe because the puh sounds so much like the buh sound, that it's brute or broom. The original word was fruit, but I couldn't hear it because the first sound of the word made my brain give me different suggestions. Second, it's important to know that not all vowel and consonant substitutions are the same. Some are more important than others in English. For example, you may recognize that English has two different ways to pronounce the T-H sound. It can be unvoiced like the word think or voiced as in the word this. Now, some secondary language English speakers substitute a tuh or a duh sound. So instead of think this, they might say, tink diss. Others, like French speakers might say, sink this. But it's easy for native speakers to understand even if you substitute these other sounds. Why? Because the voiced and unvoiced T-H sounds don't have what's called a high functional load. Functional load are the sounds that help us differentiate one word from another. Like bit, bat, bought, bite, beat. Notice the first and last sounds are the same, buh and tuh, but the vowel sounds in the middle change, making each word a completely different word. Let's look at the T-H sounds again. If you say my fah-der or my fah-zer, I'll understand that you're saying my father, because there are so few other words that use those sounds in that order. Now, focusing on vowels and constants that have a high functional load, will save you time and energy. So we've provided a list in order of the most important to the least in our resources section. And newly developed AI pronunciation tools, like Bold Voice and Elsa provide the type, of feedback you need if you want to practice them. We'll give you additional information about those resources later in the course. Let's move on. The middle two areas of the pyramid, word endings, and linking and reducing, are important for the fluidity of speech. We've provided a re-spelling guide in our resources too. And in chapter two, we will walk you through how to use the guide to write out words that might be pronounced differently than they are spelled. It also helps with word endings and for linking sounds. All of which will help you sound more fluid. The last two areas of the pyramid are the most important for our purposes. And the remainder of this course will focus on them, stress and rhythm, followed by intonation and inflection. Together, they make up the single most important part of listener friendly pronunciation. Together they are called prosody. Now, think of prosody as the musicality of a language. The way we communicate intention, focus, and meaning. By focusing on prosody, we're doing exactly what researchers suggest can improve your delivery in English, not the individual pronunciation, but the macroscopic details of how to speak clearly with confidence and intention. Let me explain why these elements of prosody, the music of the language, are so vital for clear speech. English is a stress timed language where the rhythm of individual words and phrases provide important information. You see, we listen for that information differently than in other languages where syllables often have more equal weight like they do in Spanish or Japanese. In English, if I put the emphasis on a different syllable it becomes difficult to understand. Why? Because English speakers tend to store vocabulary items in their memories according to their stress pattern. When you stress the word differently, you often first change the vowel sounds as a result. So a change in the normal stress makes it very difficult to understand. Here are some examples. Comedy, committee. Your surname, username. We find it difficult to interpret the meaning when a word is pronounced with a different stress pattern. We begin to look up in our brain's dictionary other possible words using this different stress pattern. And finally, the elements of pacing, pausing, of word stress and inflection, give fluidity to your speech. They help the listener follow your speech more easily. All of these elements can be learned quickly and easily, and help you present with more confidence and authenticity. Our next lesson is a quick summary of everything we've learned in chapter one, before we put our ideas into practice in chapter two.