SEGMENT DYNAMICS: ASPECTS OF CONNECTED SPEECH
Unit 5: Segment dynamics. Aspects of connected speech
Unit 5 explains common phenomena of connected speech in English: coarticulation, assimilation, elision, linking, juncture and gradation, the latter referring to the different realisations of sounds (i.e. weak vs. strong) that result from the metrical structure of speech and their position in the syllable.
Introduction
The exercises in this unit summarise the main variants (or allophones) of RP phonemes arising from the aforementioned phenomena with their corresponding notation conventions or diacritics, which show how sounds influence one another when put together in words, phrases, sentences and speech sequences. Roughly, what happens is that the faster we speak, the less carefully and clearly we distinguish the beginning of one word from the end of the previous one, and some features of final and initial sounds start merging together because of economy of articulatory effort (i.e. laziness).