Connected Speech in Listening and Speaking
This paper delves into some interesting aspects of connected speech created in casual speech, centering around such features as linking, reduction, foot, and rhythm, all of which are taken to arise from stress in English. I conducted a survey among two groups of college students 15 first year and 15 second year English majors to examine how such features are implemented in their aural perception and oral production. The findings of the survey are as follows. First, the two groups of subjects are shown to commit more errors in function words in terms of aural perception. Second, the group of 15 second year students are shown to perform better in oral production in terms of stress timed rhythm by putting less prominence on function words, as indicated in mean power measured by Praat, a software program for the analysis of speech. I argue that their performance is facilitated by explicit teaching and learning of the features in question.