CONNECTED SPEECH

[Edward1989]

Good evening,
I've been learning English phonetics and phonology on my own. Now, I'm looking for some exercises, books, CDs or anything else in order to practice all I've learnt in a connected speech (linking R, elision, weak forms, consonant to vowel linking, sounds twining and so on). May be you know some authors, because I've found nothing.

Also, I'd like to ask you about linking between -ING in the final position preceded by a word which begins with a vowel sound.

I know that usually we do not pronounce /G/ in words: interesting, boring, working, thing .....

But, if the following word is 'idea' which begins with a vowel sound /aɪ/, is the sound /g/ pronounced in order to link these two words or not?

Ex: an interesting idea /ən 'ɪntərəstɪŋ aɪdɪə/ OR /ən 'ɪntərəstɪŋ gaɪdɪə/

Thanks for your response,

 

[Nichalia]

Are you learning from the perspective of a person trying to train themselves to speak English with native-like pronunciation, or are you learning from a more academic perspective? You listed several key aspects of phonetics, which is why I ask. It might also be helpful to know what you're after; people could give you better suggestions.

There are resources for this, of course. A big question mark you'll want to answer is about which kind of English pronunciation you're after (US, British, etc) and if you're interested in regional variations. One that's written for a learner to use is American Accent Training by Ann Cook. It won't have academic terms (elision, assimilation, etc) but it was written to draw a non-native speaker's attention to aspects of standard American pronunciation.

Personally, I've found that many 'accent training' kind of programs have unnatural pronunciation. If you want examples of really nice speech, you could always visit voice acting websites, where voice actors have posted their audio demos. Those are free to listen to, and are often a much more reliable source of appropriate speech than something created by teachers. (Not always, of course, but I'm sure you've noticed enough nonsense on the internet to be a bit wary by now!)

What kind of exercises and practice are you after, specifically?