44 – Gap-fill 02 – Streamlining

In the previous post, I expressed the wish that it would be nice if gap-fill exercises involved explicit exploration and discussion of the soundshapes of the words which fit in the gap. So let’s do that now. In this case, we had this extract with the underlined words gapped out:

You have to really be able to salsa dance

And the words be able to, extracted from this soundfile sound like this:

be able to

To my ears (a very important phrase) the words be able to sound close to be yell tuh |biːjeltə| or be yale tuh |biːjeɪltə| – what do you think? In the extract below, you can hear these words in three different versions: first in citation form, then the original version, and then the original slowed down by fifty percent.

be able to (x 3)

(It is often the case that I hear different things in the sound substance when I listen in different ways, and on different occasions. And you, and your students, may hear different things from those that I hear. This is natural, and not to be worried about – not least because precision is not the aim. The aim in decoding is to do fuzzy-matching: matching up the mushy swash of raw sound substance to known words.)

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a simple way of describing the differences between the forms that occurred and the citation forms? And one which is easy to use so that fellow teachers and intermediate and advanced students can understand? Well there is. This is what I have aimed to do in A Syllabus for Listening – Decoding.

It is best to start with a speech unit view:

|| you HAVE to really be able to SALsa dance ||

Briefly, we can say the following of the word-cluster be able to:

• The three words are part of a double-prominence speech unit
• They occur in a non-prominent section (between the prominences on the syllables HAVE and SAL-)
• This non-prominent section is a ‘crush-zone’, where words are likely to have streamlined sound-shapes
• The speed of be able to is nearly double the speed of the speech unit as a whole: 12.5 syllables per second, compared to 6.7 sps

And the word able |ˈeɪb.ᵊl| is subjected to the following streamlining processes:

• b-drop – the consonant |b| is dropped, resulting in a syll-drop – a syllable is dropped, the two-syllable word becomes a monosyllable between |el| and |eɪl|
• smoothing – the diphthong |eɪl| becomes close to |el|
• Vow-elling – the final consonant |el| is vowelled giving us something close to eh-oo (spoken very fast) |eʊ|

It is very often the case that when considering an extract of spontaneous speech (authentic speech) that the point you are focussing on is not the only point of interest. In this case we get an additional syll-drop in the you have to which undergoes the streamlining effects of

• h-drop – the consonant |h| is dropped resulting in …
• a syll-drop – a syllable is dropped, the two syllables of you have |juː hæv| becoming a monosyllable y’ave |jæv|
• v-blur – the consonant |v| is blurred, giving us something close to |jæf|  yaff this 

These are a few things to notice and explain about the sound shapes which did occur. In this post we have considered just one example, and it would be a mistake to think that the streamlining effects which apply to these words in spontaneous speech would always result in these particular sound shapes. More in the next post.

Image from here.