Write a report on supra-segmental aspects of pronunciation errors and the causes for

the errors with evidence from literature.

1.0 Introduction

Pronunciation is how someone convey the message through speaking, it is the most
important thing in conversation, especially for the non-native speaker to increase their
speaking skills. According to Fangzhi (1998:39), “someone’s message can be easily
delivered if the pronunciation is correct”. There are 2 things that we need to look at when
explaining about pronunciation which is the Supra-segmental and segmental of
pronunciation. In supra-segmental it cover the features of stress, intonation, rhythm, while
segmental is how someone make a clear sound of vowels and consonants.

For this assignment, we used an English conversation and asked 3 non-native

speakers of English, which is Eidil, Rosli and Sebastian to play the role of Sarah, Laurie and
Christie respectively. The 3 people selected have little to no history of conversing in English
with the native speakers while Eidil and Rosli’s first language is Bahasa Malaysia, while for
Sebastian is Bahasa Iban.

2.0 Patterns of Stress

The main problem that the conversation had is the word stress. According to Collins
(2013) stress is the main important roles in pronunciations where the word may be stress if it
is more than one syllable. There are 4 important indicators in stress, intensity of the sound,
the variation of pitch, vowel quality and duration. Throughout the conversations, there are
some mistakes of word stress that can be found. For example,line 34 Eidil stress on the last
syllable of the word Project

Sarah: I will talk to her. I think she will like that. It will help her with school projects

when Halloween comes.

According to the word rules, words that has 2 syllables noun, must have stress on the first
syllable, but Eidil did it vice versa. This error can lead to misunderstanding between the
speaker and listener. Stress is very important in speaking as it will provide a way of
distinguishing degrees of emphasis or contrast in sentences or lines of verse. According to
Roach (2009: 76): “it would be easier to go back to the idea of learning the stress for each
word individually”
2.1 Rhythm

Furthermore, another error that can be detected in the conversation is the rhythm. As we
know, the speakers are not native speaker, errors and mistakes can be found throughout the
conversation. Abercrombie (1967: 96) remarks that “all human speech possesses rhythm”.
English is a stress-timed language as its rhythm is produced by the combination of stressed
and unstressed syllables (British Council, 2007)

Rhythm is very important, it is the sense of movement in speech. In other words, some
syllables are stressed more than others and some might even pronounced longer. The
example below are taken from the recorded conversation.

Sarah: My cousin Karen is in town. Can I bring her along? I hate to leave her home

alone.

The rhythm is not correctly produced and this will lead to a confusion especially when talking
with the native speaker of the language. We notice that in the recorded conversation, Eidil
was uttering out all the sentences with only strong forms, which will produce a wrong rhythm,
which in turn, will inhibit the meaning from being conveyed (British Council, 2007)

This was supported by Bertrán (1999), where he states that rhythm produce the exact
meaning of a language, and what the speaker want the listener to get. This can actually
create difficulties for listeners to comprehend what the speaker is trying to say.

2.3 Intonation

Next is the intonation. Roach (2009) defines intonation as “the use of the pitch of the

voice to convey meaning”. There are 3 intonation patterns that should be used in a
conversation which is the rise, fall, and a partial fall . For example, I got a DOG. The word
dog is on a rise intonation,with close reference to the conversation we can see in line 3 :

Sarah: How about going to see a movie? Cinemax 26 on Carson Boulevard is

showing Enchanted.
2.3 a) Falling Intonation

According to Carter, McCarthy, Mark, and O’Keeffe (as cited in Cambridge Dictionary, n.d.),
falling intonation is usually found in wh-questions. The examples below are provided with an
arrow, , to show the falling intonation on certain words.

What’s your name?

Falling intonation is also used when we want to make a clear statement:

I think we are completely lost.

In this case, Eidil was not questioning a wh-question but he was using the falling intonation
on the word “movie” . Using this type of intonation might confuse the listener as they might
think that he imposed a statement, instead of a question.

2.3 b) Partial Fall

By listening to Eidil’s intonation on the word “Enchanted” he is using the partial fall which
can be misinterpreted as a word that has no clue to us, or the speaker wants to add more
after that. The problem that arouse here is Eidil stopped after Enchanted. He is supposed to
use a falling intonation to clear that he is done talking.

2.4 Connected Speech

Last but not least is connected speech. In connected speech, speech is continuous without
clear-cut borderlines and pauses between each word (British Council, 2005).We do not
pronounce the word, pause, and then proceed to utter the next word in the sentence. In
order for us to speak smoothly, the way we pronounce the end and beginning of some words
can change depending on the sounds at the beginning and end of those words. Below is an
example to the error from the conversations:

from line 13

What does /wɒt / /dʌz /

Rosli was pronouncing “ What does”, word by word and it should be done in writing but not in
speaking. He should have pronounced it by linking the word. / wɒdʌz /. This is called the
linking consonant where the same consonant is found especially in the first word. For
examplet,d, k,g According to Roach (1983, 1991) “in our hypothetical ‘mechanical speech’ all
words would be separate units placed next to each other in sequence; in real connected
speech, however, we sometimes link words together.”

Weak forms are also used in connected speech and are often pronounced as a schwa
(British Council, 2006)

An example can be found when Sebastian, playing the role of Christie, didn’t use the correct
stress to the following sentence:

Christie: Karen is in town? Yes, bring her along. Laurie, you remember Karen? We met her
at Sara’s high school graduation party two years ago.

Sebastian was said as not using the correct stress pattern as he pronounced the highlighted
word, “at”, as /æt/, which is the strong form of the word. He should have pronounce the word
as /ət/ as it is a preposition which is unstressed (British Council, 2007)

2.5 Mispronounciation of words and the causes

There are some words that was mispronounced when the recording of the conversation took
place. We will discuss on how some words are mispronounced and the causes. One of the
main factors that affects the pronunciation of these words is the adaptation by the speakers
to use the rule from their first language and use it in the English language.

English is a stress-timed language (Cauldwell, 1996) which means in English, the interval
between two stressed syllables is equal. On the other hand, a language is said to be a
syllable-timed language when its syllables take approximately equal amount of time to
pronounce (British Council, 2008). The first language of each respective speakers of the
recorded conversation are syllable-timed which is the reason on why words such as
“Enchanted” and “at” are pronounced wrongly. Below are the lines from which these words
(highlighted)are extracted :
Example

Laurie: Good idea again. I heard they just came up with a new pizza. It should be good
because Summer Pizza House always has the best pizza in town.

In the recorded conversation, the speaker was heard pronouncing the word “Pizza” as /pɪzɅ/
while the correct pronunciation of the word in English is /’pi:tsə/ (New Oxford English-
English-Malay Dictionary, 2000). In Bahasa Malaysia, New Oxford English-English-Malay
Dictionary (2000) states that the correct pronunciation of the word “Pizza” is /pɪzɅ/. Due to
this, the speaker tends to use the pronunciation that he perceives to be correct.

The speaker also mispronounce the word “Hear” as / hɪəd/. This might be due to the fact
that the speaker was confused between the pronunciation of the root word, “Hear” and the
past tense, “Heard”. By practicing uttering the word “Hear” as /hɪə/, the speaker assumes
that the word “Heard” is to be pronounced the same way as “Hear”, with an extra /d/ sound.
In the example below, another speaker was also pronouncing a word wrongly because of the
same reason.

3.0 Conclusion

Overall, it may be said that pronunciation work should be seen as something very important
in conversation. The connected speech help student to understand what the speaker wanted
to say, besides, students will benefit from learning the weak forms and stress patterns of
new words from the start, rather than in a remedial lesson months later. Pronunciation
without the use of connected speech is like music without rhythm. It will lead to
misinterpretation and change the whole context of the idea one wanted to say. Hence,
speaking requires speaker to be able to judge wisely according to the suprasegmental
features especially for the non-native speaker so they can learn and grow more.
Reference

British Council. (2005). Connected speech. Retrieved from

https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/connected-speech
British Council (2006). Weak forms. Retrieved from
https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/weak-forms

British Council. (2007). Rhythm. Retrieved from

https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/rhythm
British Council. (2008). Syllable- Timed Language. Retrieved from
https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/syllable-timed-languages

Cambridge Dictionary. (n.d.). Intonation. Retrieved from

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/speaking/intonation

Cauldwell, R. (1996). Stress-timing: observations, beliefs, and evidence. Eger Journal Of

English Studies, 1(01), 33-48.

New Oxford English-English-Malay Dictionary (2nd ed.). (2004). Shah alam, Selangor Darul
Ehsan: Oxford University Press