Sound Patterns of Spoken English

Sound Patterns of Spoken English is a concise, to–the–point compendium of information about the casual pronunciation of everyday English as compared to formal citation forms. The book examines changes that occur to certain sounds and in certain parts of words and syllables in the casual, unmonitored speech of native English speakers. It outlines major phonological processes found in conversational English; reviews and criticizes attempts to include these processes in phonological theory; and surveys experimental approaches to explaining casual English pronunciation. Among the varieties of English covered are General American and Standard Southern British, but many other accents are mentioned, especially those of mainland Britain. Sound Patterns of Spoken English is of interest to students and scholars in a wide variety of fields, including sociolinguistics, lexicography, rhetoric, language learning and speech sciences, and has an accompanying website – http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/shockey – with examples from different accents.

List of Figures and Tables. Preface. 1 Setting the Stage. 1.1 Phonetics or Phonology? 1.2 Fast Speech? 2 Processes in Conversational English. 2.1 The Vulnerability Hierarchy. 2.2 Reduction Processes in English. 2.3 Stress as a Conditioning Factor. 2.4 Syllabic Conditioning Factors. 2.5 Other Processes. 2.6 Icons. 2.7 Weak Forms? 2.8 Combinations of these Processes. 3 Attempts at Phonological Explanation. 3.1 Past Work on Conversational Phonology. 3.2 Natural Phonology. 3.3 Variable Rules. 3.4 More on Rule Order. 3.5 Attempts in the 1990s. 3.6 And into the New Millennium. 4 Experimental Studies in Casual Speech. 4.1 Production of Casual Speech. 4.2 Perception of Casual Speech. 5 Applications. 5.1 Phonology. 5.2 First and Second Language Acquisition. 5.3 Interacting with Computers. Bibliography. Index.

Linda Shockey is Lecturer in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at the University of Reading. She specializes in acoustic and articulatory phonetics and phonology and is co–editor of In Honor of Ilse Lehiste (1988).

"…the detailed information that is densely packed into this quite short text will be appreciated by many phoneticians, who will find it an exceptionally useful summary of the processes that affect conversational speech and the contexts under which they are most likely to occur." ( Journal of the International Phonetic Association )