Unit 2: NOT supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

I learned a completely new term that I had never heard of as an L1 English speaker. Suprasegmentals. These are often referred to as the musical aspects of speech and include pitch, duration and loudness(Nordquist, 2020)  We vary our speech dependent on who we are talking to at the time. We don't talk to a baby or a puppy with the same pitch, volume or sounding of words that we would use when speaking during a presentation to colleagues. We use this variance of speech,especially pitch and loudness to convey our emotions in speech, the passion we feel for the person or the topic. In terms of the pitch of our voice it helps to signal to the listener whether there is more to come when we have a rise to our voice. I think it is important that our language classes provide an opportunity for students to practice the sound of their words. Some lightness can be added to a class by practicing the same phrase but stressing different words each time to change the meaning. Engaging the class by having them guess the emotion behind the sentence can be a fun way to practice an important part of acquiring the language and improving the speaker's 'natural' sound.

Nordquist, Richard. "Suprasegmental Definition and Examples." ThoughtCo, Jan. 29, 2020, thoughtco.com/suprasegmental-speech-1692008.

Nordquist, Richard. "Phonetic Prosody." ThoughtCo, Jan. 29, 2020, thoughtco.com/prosody-phonetics-1691693.