1
Speech has no spaces
Writing puts a gap between every word. Speech does not. The sound arrives as one run with no breaks, and a listener has to cut it up. Every learner is doing this work and almost nobody is told they are doing it.
Lesson · Listening · Nobody leaves gaps between words. Something else marks them
Where a Word Begins
Speech has no spaces in it. A listener has to work out where one word stops and the next starts, and English gives them a strong clue: most words that carry meaning begin with their strong part. On the page in the lab, 474 words outside the list of small words carry a mark for their strong part, and 390 of them start on it, which is 82.3%. So a strong part is a good guess at a new word, and this lesson counts how good.
474 other words, strong part marked
390 of them start strong 82.3%
S = said hardest . = said lightly
s = some weight, but not the most
FAther ANswer CARriage
beLIEVE aGAIN reTURN
Counted on the same page as the last lesson
Core ideas
What this lesson establishes
Three ideas, and the first is the one nobody tells you.
2
A strong part is a good guess at a new word
Most English words that carry meaning are said with their first part hardest. So when a listener hears a strong part, the likeliest explanation is that a new word has started. It is a guess, and on the page in the lab it is right 82.3% of the time.
3
The two lessons work together
The last lesson said about two words in five of what you hear are small words, most of them squashed into a weak form. This one says most of the rest announces itself with a strong part. Those two facts between them are how the run of sound gets cut into words.
The material
Where the guess fails
Not every word starts strong. The ones that do not fall into a few groups, and they are worth knowing.
Write a sentence down and it comes with spaces in it. Say the same sentence and the spaces are gone. The sound arrives as one run, and the person listening has to decide where each word stops.
You do this in your own language without noticing. In a new language it is most of the difficulty, and almost nobody mentions it.
The help English gives
English words that carry meaning are usually said with their first part hardest. Father, answer, carriage, happiness all lead with their strong part.
So a strong part is a reasonable guess that a new word has just started. On the page in the lab, 474 words outside the list of small words carry a mark for their strong part, and 390 of them start that way: 82.3%. A few names and rare words carry no mark and are not counted either way, and nor are a few short grammar words, such as it, in and with, that keep their shape but carry no mark.
The marks come from CMUdict, a list of American pronunciations. British and American speakers put the strong part in the same place in nearly every word, and the few words where they differ, such as address, are not on this page.
Why that is enough to work with
Four times in five is not sure, and it does not need to be. A listener is not deciding one boundary on its own; they are using this help many times a second alongside everything else they know, and a guess that is right four times in five is very strong help.
It also fits with the last lesson. About two words in five of what you hear are small words, said short and carrying little meaning. Most of the rest announces itself by being said strongly at the front. Between them, the run of sound has a shape.
Where it fails
Nearly one word in five starts on a light part instead: believe, again, return, another. Look at those and a pattern appears. They begin with a small piece stuck on the front, and those pieces are almost never the strong part.
That makes the failures easy to learn. You are not facing one word in five at random; you are facing a short set of front pieces, and once you know them you know when to expect the strong part to come second.
Knowing the front pieces is one rule. Word Stress scores others, by the class of the word and by its ending, and prints the words each one misses. They are the way to guess the strong part of a word you have only read.
What to do with this
Stop trying to catch everything. Listen for the strong parts, take the meaning from the words carrying them, and let the small words go by. Most of what sat between the strong parts came from the list in the last lesson, and you can often work it out afterwards without having heard it clearly at all.
That is not a trick for people starting out. It is what a listener who grew up with the language is already doing.
Interactive
Why it sounds too fast, marked on the page
Press Listen above to hear the page; this marks what to listen for
words that can be squashed—
share of the page—
different ones used—
of them that, have, has or had—
other words starting strong—
squashable words before . , ; : ? or !—
of the other words, starting strong—
| word | squashed, said as | times on the page |
|---|
Method
Using it on something you are listening to
Four steps.
1
Stop trying to catch every word
Two in five of them are small words said short, and you will not catch those first. Let them go past.
2
Listen for the strong parts
They are louder, longer and clearer than what surrounds them. Each one is probably the front of a word that matters.
3
Take the meaning from those
The words carrying the message are the ones being said strongly. If you get those you usually have the sentence.
4
Fill the gaps afterwards
What sat between the strong parts was almost certainly from the list in the last lesson, and you can often work out which without having heard it clearly at all.
Check yourself
Score 0 / 0Choose the answer you can justify.
The words that start light
A dot is a light part and S is the strong one.
start strong start light
FAther S. beLIEVE .S
ANswer S. aGAIN .S
MARket S. reTURN .S
HAPpiness S.. aNOTHer .S.
390 of 474 start strong 82.3%
Most of the words that start light begin with a small piece added to the front — be-, a-, re-, un-, de-, con-. Those pieces are almost never said strongly.
So the guess fails in a group you can learn rather than at random, which is what makes it useful. A listener who knows the front pieces knows when to expect the strong part to arrive second.
A small s in the lab marks a part with some weight but not the most, as in conversation, marked s.S.. The count here treats a word that begins that way as starting light, which is the strict test. Many of the words that start strong have only one part, and start strong by having nowhere else to put it.
Common mistakes
1
Trying to hear every word equallyTwo in five of them are small words said short, and they will not reward the effort. Listening for the strong parts first is not cutting corners; it is what a native listener does.
2
Reading the strong part off the spellingThe spelling alone does not say where the strong part falls. Record is two different words depending on it. There are rules, by the class of the word and by its ending, and Word Stress scores them; each has a list of words it misses. The lab prints the strong part of every word on its page, so you can check what you expected.
3
Taking 82.3% as a rule rather than a guessNearly one word in five starts light. The figure is useful because it is high, not because it is certain, and the lesson names the group where it fails.
Check your understanding
✓
Finish when you can say why a strong part is a good guess at the start of a word, and how often that guess is right.
You should be able to mark the strong part of a written word, say what share of words carry it at the front, explain why that makes it useful for finding word boundaries in speech, and name the kinds of word where the guess fails.
Note: The 82.3% here is for written prose from 1813. Work on recorded conversation puts the figure closer to nine in ten, which is quoted from Cutler and Carter (1987) rather than counted on this page, and their test was looser than the lab’s: they counted any part with a full vowel as strong, so a word like conversation started strong for them and starts light here.