This past Thursday, students in English for lunch
had a look at connected speech. Sometimes
English learners can understand all the words in a spoken sentence and still
not understand what the sentence means. Why is that? The answer is: Connected
speech. Written language is different from spoken language and even in spoken
language, there are differences depending on if we say isolated words or if we
link all together in a stream of speech.
For example, ‘What do you do?’, a question which
most lower-level students understand easily on paper, becomes a fast,
incomprehensible blurt with a /ʤu:/ (imagine the word juice without the /s/ sound) at the beginning. What are (as in What are
the numbers?) becomes /wɒ-də/ and what
have (as in What have you done?) becomes /wɒ-dəv/.
 |
| Red dye |
 |
| Red eye |
There are several types of changes that happen in a
stream of English speech. The title of this article is an example of Delayed plosion. To quote eslbase.com ‘To
articulate “red dye”, we must take a very short pause before the /d/ sound. The
/d/ is an example of a plosive, consonant sounds where the vocal tract stops
all airflow. Other examples are /b/,/d/, /g/, /p/, /t/ and /k/. This pause
before the plosive gives us the name of this feature, delayed plosion. Another
example: the right tie (delay) – the right eye (no delay)’
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