Ying’s dilemma, and squeeze zones

Image from here

I promised more about squeeze zones. Here it is.

The reason for my fascination with listening, and for my interest in squeeze zones, comes from reading an article about a Singaporean learner called Ying.

Ying is a learner who kept a diary about her experiences while she was learning to listen. She wrote:

‘I believe I need to learn what the word sounds like when it is used in the sentence. Because sometimes when a familiar word is used in a sentence, I couldn’t catch it. Maybe it changes somewhere when it is used in a sentence’ (Goh 1997, p. 366).

Ying’s dilemma (= a situation which makes problems) is that she fails to recognise familiar words when she hears them. She believes that she needs to learn something: how words change their soundshape when they occur in a sentence. Ying is describing clearly a problem that many native speaker teachers are largely unaware of: the soundshapes of words do change according to their relationships to other words.

The following four speech units, taken from Brazil (1994, chapter 1) illustrate Ying’s dilemma. In each of them, the word ‘where’ occurs, and it sounds different each time. Note the different pronunciations of ‘where’ – they are collected together at the end of the soundsoundfile:

01 || but i WASn’t sure WHERE ||
02 || WHERE MARket street was ||
03 || where she’d SAID ||
04 || where there were STREET LIGHTS ||
…WHERE…WHERE….where…where

Ying’s dilemma

In 01 ‘where’ sounds close to the citation form that you would find in the dictionary; in 02 it is shorter and the vowel is less of a diphthong; in 03 and 04 both ‘wheres’ sound like the short sharp bleat of a lamb. What these four examples show, quite neatly, is that words do indeed change their shape according to their relationship to other words.

Here are the four examples again, side-by-side in a sound file:

…WHERE…WHERE….where…where

Wheres only

Let’s look at these speech units in the five-part pattern. Remember from yesterday that prominent syllables occur alone in the even-numbered columns, 4 and 2. The odd numbered columns contain any number of non-prominent syllables, including zero. The squeeze zones are columns five and three.

	5	4	3	2	1
01	but i	WAS	n’t sure	WHERE
02		WHERE		MAR	ket street was
03			where she’d	SAID
04	where there were	STREET		LIGHTS

Ying’s dilemma

In 01, ‘where’ is prominent, tonic (falling tone) and it occurs before a pause: these are optimal conditions for the production of a citation form, but are relatively rare in everyday speech.

In 02, ‘where’ is prominent early in the speech unit, and is therefore not before a pause, it is therefore shorter than in 01.

In 03 and 04 the two ‘where’s are non-prominent,  – in squeeze zones 3 and 5 respectively. It is the fact that they are in squeeze zones that give them these interesting shapes.

Position in the speech unit, and choice by the speaker of whether or not to make a word prominent, are therefore key determinants of the sound shapes of any word.

To help learners like Ying, we need to tell them about squeeze zones, and demonstrate what can happen in them.

Brazil, D. (1994). Pronunciation for Advanced Learners of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Goh, C. (1997). Metacognitive awareness and second language listeners. ELT Journal 51(4), 361-369