10 Decoding: sounds, syllables and words
10.3 Processing syllables
Table 10.3 (cont.)
Note-taking. ‘Listen to these answerphone messages. Write down the names of the people who left them and where they are from.’
Hello. My name’s Harper. I’m ringing from the Grove Corporation in Darwin.
Locating words on a map by approximate matching. ‘Follow the journey on a map, marking the stations that are mentioned.’
Here is a map of the London Underground / New York subway / Sydney City Circle. Let me tell you how to get to where I live. The nearest station to you is [A]. Can you find it? Now, get the northbound train as far as [B]. When you get to [B], you have to change to the [X] line and get the train going towards [C]. You get off at [D]. . .
the structure of the syllable (basically, the number of consonants that a language permits within a syllable);
the frequency of weak syllables like those in English containing schwa (/ə/);
the ratio between the time taken by weak and by strong syllables.
An unfamiliar rhythm can interfere significantly with a listener’s abil-ity to recognise known words in connected speech. So here is another reason for a language instructor to give adequate time to syllable-level processing.
10.3.1 Syllable structure First language processing
The first factor mentioned, the structure of the syllable, demands particular attention. It varies greatly from one language to another, and a listener’s expectations are inevitably shaped by what she is familiar with in L1. It would seem that that by far the most common syllable forms across languages are CV (consonant–vowel) and CVC (consonant–vowel–consonant). Some languages such as Spanish or Italian rely heavily upon an open CV syllable consist-ing of a consonant and vowel, while others allow much greater variety. English represents an extreme case in the number and complexity of its syllable types. It even permits a CCCVCCCC syllable in the word strengths (/streŋkθs/ in its citation form).
Native listeners are also attuned to processing the specific consonant clusters that exist in their language: combinations such as /kl/ or /pr/ or /spl/ that occur at the beginnings of syllables and others such as /ŋk/ or /n/ that occur at the ends. These clusters are usually discussed in terms of how they are produced: native speakers are said to have no difficulty in making the /s/–/p/ transition at the beginning of a word like sport, whereas non-native speakers sometimes employ epenthesis, producing [espɔ t] (Spanish speakers) or [spɔ t] (some varieties of Arabic). How-ever, recent evidence has suggested that this may be a problem of listening as well as of speaking. While expert listeners hear the /sp/ as a cluster, less experienced ones hear the consonant sequence the way they pronounce it.
Second language practice
Listening instructors should introduce learners at an early stage to the range of syllable types in the target language. Simple transcription exer-cises can be used over a period of time in order to ensure that the L2 listener can reproduce the more complex syllables accurately. Given the
epenthesis finding, there should also be practice in detecting consonant clusters in words. Table 10.4 provides some examples.
Table 10.4 Exercises in syllable structure
Syllable recognition (an alternative to phoneme recognition).
‘Listen and write down the syllables you hear. Some may be whole words; some may not.’ Teacher reads aloud the most frequent syllable strings of the target language, based on a word frequency ranking.
Matching exercise. ‘Listen to the words on your worksheet.
Identify the syllables which occur in more than one word.’
consumption exciting reckon somebody Egyptian physics tinkle
Consonant clusters. ‘Write down the words you hear. They may be words you do not know.’ Teacher dictates infrequent words beginning or ending with common consonant clusters of the language. Learners are encouraged to recognise clusters by analogy with known words. Teacher checks to see if learners have inserted additional vowels.
blank bracken plight prickle clench crackle glimpse grind speckle spasm spray strangle slacken scribble
Graded syllables. Teacher dictates monosyllabic words representing all possible L2 syllable patterns: starting with V, CV and VC and going on to complex patterns. Repeat with infrequent words that the learners do not know. For guidance on syllable types in English, see Roach, 2000: Chap. 8.
A ray pray spray sprain strained
E fee eat east beast cream creased screen screamed rang rank crank length strength
10.3.2 Syllable stress First language processing
In many languages, there is a clearly marked distinction between syllables that are given prominence and those that are not. This contributes to the characteristic rhythm of a language and serves to highlight certain
parts of the input that are especially informative. It has been suggested (Grosjean and Gee, 1987) that the stressed syllable of a word might provide an access code for the skilled listener – a way of locating the word when searching through one’s mental vocabulary. An important key to recognising the word phoTOGraphy would lie in the stressed sequence /tɒ / and the key to magaZINE would lie in /zi n/.
Whether this is the case or not, stressed syllables are of consider-able help to the listener. They tend to be reliconsider-able and easier to perceive since they are usually louder and more clearly produced than unstressed ones. There is much evidence (Bond, 1999) that first language listeners rely much more heavily on the phonetic information in stressed sylla-bles than on the information in unstressed ones, treating the former as
‘islands of reliability’ in a speech stream that is sometimes muddy and fast-flowing.
Unstressed syllables also play a part in the decoding of connected speech. In many languages, they are associated with function words such as the, it, for, of, etc. – words, usually of one syllable, which contribute to the grammatical structure of the sentences rather than bearing the kind of meaning we associate with items of vocabulary. There is considerable evidence from English that first language listeners exploit this association in order to identify possible function words at an early stage of decoding.
There are advantages attached to this procedure in that it enables a listener to process function words separately from content words and more rapidly. With a content word, one needs to retrieve a meaning;
but with a functor, all that is required is for the listener to match the weak syllable against a small set of around 100 to 150 highly frequent items.
Second language practice
The way in which prominence is marked varies from language to language, and in some cases listening instructors may need to ensure that their learners are capable of distinguishing syllables that have been foregrounded (usually those that have been stressed) from those that have not. Pronunciation handbooks (e.g. Dalton and Seidlhofer, 1994:
97–9) often provide useful examples of ear-training exercises which require learners to distinguish stressed from unstressed syllables in lists of words.3
3 Recognising stress in words may not be a serious problem for many listeners.
Archibald (1998: 184) records a much lower rate of error in perceiving stressed syllables than in producing correctly stressed words.
It is quite easy to design exercises that encourage learners firstly to pay special heed to stressed syllables and secondly to use them as guides to the presence of a particular word. Table 10.5 provides some examples.
Note that one can apply a minimal pair approach to syllables as well as to whole words.
Table 10.5 Exercises using syllable cues
Faint speech. ‘You will hear some sentences in L1 played very quietly. You may not be able to hear all of the words. Try to write down the stressed syllables. Then try to guess which words they come from.’
Strong syllables as access cues. ‘Sometimes a stressed syllable is the only part of a word that you hear clearly. Listen to these stressed syllables. Can you guess what the whole word is?’
[initial syllable] /twen/ (twenty) /mɔ n/ (morning) /brek/ (breakfast) /n m/ (number) /n θ/ (nothing)
/n ð/ (another) /df/ (different/difficult) /ds/ (distant/distance) /prɒb/ (problem/probably) /prɒp/ (proper/property)
/weð/ (whether/weather) /kwes/ (question) /s f/ (surface) /s v/ (service) /s t/ (certain) /m n/ (money) /m ŋ/ (monkey) /mn/ (minute/minimum) /ms/ (Mr/Mrs) /pɒs/ (possible) /pɒz/ (positive) /bz/ (business) /bs/ (biscuit)
[internal or final syllable] /mem/ (remember) /hps/ (perhaps) /pəυz/ (suppose) /sad/ (beside/decide) /pɔ t/ (important) /meʃ/ (information) /nʃ/ (international) /twi n/ (between) /n f/ (enough)
It is also relatively easy to design exercises which make learners aware of the connection between weak syllables and function words in the language they are studying. A teacher might, for example, play groups of words such as the following which contain combinations of stressed and unstressed syllables. Learners would be asked to transcribe the stressed words on a first play of the recording and the others on a second play.
They would then be asked to comment on the fact that many of the unstressed words play a grammatical role rather than contributing to lexical meaning.
THIS is the DOG that CHASED the CAT that KILLED the RAT that LIVED in the HOUSE that JACK BUILT.
BOX of MATCHes WAITed at HOME WENT to the BANK LOOKING at the SKY GUESSes the TIME PLACes in SPAIN WANTed to KNOW PIECes of CAKE RULES for DRIVers The GLASS is BROKen.