Week 8-9: Rhythm and Stress

As we started moving into a discussion of rhythm and reduced speech in class, I went back and made some observations along those lines concerning my archetype. Although I had already marked intonation contours and primary stress early on in this project (see blog entry #2), I began to sense the  significance of the distinctions in stress and prominence when going through the vowel practice passages from Macquarie University in the last few weeks. For example, In American English,  I would stress the following sentence this way, where underlining indicates prominence and the bold capitals indicate stress:

is a LIttle LIPstick perMISsible for WOmen in eGYPtian VIllages.

But the Australian recording stresses it this way:

IS a little LIPstick perMIS-SIble for WOmen in eGYPtian VIllages.

The two patters are primarily the same, but are slightly different on a few words, and also in prominence. Here is another examples from last week's sentences:

American English #2:

THAT man had a BAD habbit of CRAMming his HATS and JACKets into a BAG

Australian #2:
THAT MAN had a BAD HABit of cramming his HATS and JACKets into a BAG

While I realize that the speaker in these particular sentences was exaggerating stress to match the target vowel phonemes, and I also realize the prominence can vary according to speaker and context, I still think that these examples draw attention to how the prosodic features distinguish American and Australian accents. I will test this theory further later, when I look at specific paragraphs from the Macquarie website.

I now sense that the rhythm of this dialect is second only to vowel shape and length in terms of markers that distinctively characterize what is "Australian". They stress things differently from both American English and British English, and in those situations where they do stress the same syllables, the length of those syllables often differs from the other two dialects. I haven't been exposed to enough of the language yet to accurately guess with decent accuracy where the stress and prominence will occur, but I am getting a bit closer. I tend to be more accurate at guessing where the stress is NOT than where it is.

This week I listened carefully and re-transcribed my archetype to emphasize stress and prominence. I bolded words for stress and CAPITALIZED and bolded what I thought showed prominence. I also revisited the intonation contours that I created in weeks 3-4. As I compared what I had written in the new transcript (below) with prosodic patterns I had been imitating, I found several areas where I had been making errors. I had been over emphasizing stressed words in a lot of areas, making the vowels too long. In each phrase there only should be one prominent element, not three or four. Here are three examples:

1) I had been saying something like "Uh MOST of the WERE...you could...I don't KNOW WHERE...like WE...I don't know WHO we WERE SPEAKing to..." when really I should only have emphasized the prominence on "Most" "where" and "speaking".

2) I have been over-stressing "asked" "one"  and "answer" in "we asked her that just NEEDed a one-word answer"

3) In my effort to accurately hit vowel points, I have been overstressing many of the stressed words that do not have prominence in the last three sentences. "I've never been able to notice beFORE how Australians raise their VOICE at the end of a SENTence"   has sounded more like this in my speech: "I'VE NEver been ABle to NOTice beFORE how Australians raise their VOICE at the end of a SENTence"

Thus in this week's recording, which you can find here (Week 9 recording), I did my best to hit the stress and prominence points more accurately. One way that I tried to focus in on this is by being especially careful with the vowels in stressed syllables while giving much less attention to the unstressed vowels. In this way I conserved my conscious energy for prominence and certain vowels, while trying to speed up my overall speaking speed to match my archetype.  I also noticed this week that my speaker is doing some interesting nasal stuff, especially on the word "sound/sounded", which is said 5 times in the dialogue. So, I tried to approximate that in this week's recording, but I think I may not have accomplished my goal.

I also recognize from listening to and analyzing this attempt that I need to spend more time on deliberate practice of the Australian /r/ phoneme, because as I try to develop more smoothness and naturalness in my speech I'm falling back on some American habits.  I also feel that I've reached a point where I've practiced the dialogue so much I can't really tell anymore what is right and what is wrong in my approximations of Australian phonemes. This is frustrating to me, and I can see how this could easily become frustrating to students of English. It is so important to get phonemes accurate at the beginning, because they are much harder to change later. I also am beginning to wish I had a real person to give me feedback. There's a limit to what personal analysis can do, and a native speaker of this dialect would be very useful to me at this point in the dialect acquisition process.