Why English Speakers are Difficult to Understand: Part 1 Sentence Stress

Have you ever wondered why first language English speakers are difficult to understand? There are several reasons for this which we will address in this series. The first element we will look at is sentence stress.

What is stress?

We can talk about stress in English in two ways: word stress and sentence stress.

Word stress

 Word stress is the syllable in the word that is said louder, longer or higher. Every word that is longer than two syllables has at least one stress point. Take the word Saturday. This word has three syllables – sat, ur,  and day. It is written phonetically as /ˈsætədeɪ/. The little line that looks like an apostrophe shows us the stress fall on the next syllable, so this word is pronounced SATurday, with the stress at the start. Stress position is also important as it can show us the type of word. Take the word record. We can pronounce this in two ways, as REcord and reCORD, the first is a noun and the second is a verb. I will go into more detail on this in anther post

Sentence Stress.

This one is more relevant to our question today, why are English speakers so difficult to understand. A lot is communicated in English with the stressed words in a sentence. Change the stress, you can change the meaning. The reason is that English is a stress timed language. That means that the speaker only applies stress to words that are necessary to understand the content of what they are saying. Some languages, such as Italian and Spanish, are syllable timed. That means that Every word has a stress point, so it is easy to hear every word the speaker is saying.

An example 

Take this extract from Terry Pratchett’s Men at Arms. In blue I have highlighted the stressed words. What do you notice? Try reading it, making the blue words stronger, louder, longer or higher than those around them.

A quote from the book men at arms. In blue are the stressed words, in black are the unstressed.

If we eliminate the other words we can see this clearer. By removing the unstressed words to focus on the stressed, we can still understand the context and content of Vime’s theory, we just lack the “grammar”. 

The same text from men at arms, but this time the unstressed words are removed, demonstrating the sentence stress that would be heard. Notice how we can still understand the general meaning

So How does this Help?

When listening to someone speaking, the desire is to listen to and understand every single word they say. Realistically, this isn’t going to be possible. I doubt even native speakers hear every word someone says (also due to connected speech and how we “cut” and abbreviate in speech). But native speakers know the tricks and can predict what the missing words or sounds are. So what is a learner to do? 

Focus on what you do hear.

This is where English is helpful. If you hear a word pronounced clearly, that means that it is important to understand the topic. If you can’t hear it clearly, it is probably just a “grammar” word, which is necessary for accuracy, but not necessary for understanding. Look back up at Sam Vimes, without the “grammar” words, we can still understand the gist or general idea of what he is saying.

Want to discover more about pronunciation? Try this post here for 10 tips to improve your pronunciation.

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Siobhan

I am an ESL instructor with over 9 years experience helping students to reach their full language learning potential.

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