Eduardo Hernandez

1. UNIVERSIDAD DE GUANAJUATO
Licenciatura en Enseñanza del Inglés
VOCBULARY AND PRONUNCATION
CONCEPTS
PROFESOR ALINE RODDAM
Autor: Eduardo Hernández Rangel

2. Contenido
PROBLEMS AREAS FOR SPANISH SPEAKERS...................................................................................3
EXAMPLES. SOME PROBLEMS WITH ENGLISH LEARNERS. ..........................................................3
MINIMAL PAIRS....................................................................................................................... 4
EXAMPLES OF MINIMAL PAIRS...............................................................................................4
STRESS AND INTONATION..........................................................................................................5
UNDERSTANDING SYLLABLES..................................................................................................5
EXAMPLES......................................................................................................................6
INTONATION........................................................................................................................6
EXAMPLES......................................................................................................................7
PHONOLOGY..........................................................................................................................7
THE PHYSICS AND PHYSIOLOGY OF SPEECH................................................................................8
BIBLIOGRAFÍA.........................................................................................................................9

3. 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;
1

4. 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

5. 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
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.
23

6. 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
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
4

7. 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.
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
5

8. 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
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
6

9. 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.
.
7