American English

Pronunciation

Workbook

This site illustrates the main phonetic features of American English using snippets of speech extracted from actual conversations. The variety of American English illustrated here is spoken in Columbus, Ohio. The recordings come from the Buckeye Corprpus of conversational speech. Many thanks to the Linguistics Department at the University of California, Berkeley for hosting this site.

Intonation patterns Declarative Fall Declarative Fall, further practice Question Rise Uncertainty contour List/continuation List/continuation, further practice Truncated Comparing different intonation contours	Vowels The tense vowels [i] [eɪ] [ɑ] [oʊ] [u] The lax vowels [ɪ] [ɛ] [æ] [ɔ] [ʊ] Diphthongs [aɪ] [aʊ] [ɔɪ] The Rhotic vowel [ɚ] Practice your IPA transcription
Word Stress patterns Two syllable words - 10, 12, 11, 01 Comparisons - two syllable words Three syllable words - 100, 102, 010 Comparisons - three syllable words Four syllable words - 1020, 0100, 2010 Comparisons - four syllable words Five syllables - 20100 pattern Reduced unstressed syllables Word Stress self-test	Consonants Stops [b] [d] [ɡ],   [p] [t] [k],   [ʧ] [ʤ],   [ʔ] Fricatives [f] [θ] [s] [ʃ] [h],   [v] [ð] [z] [ʒ] Approximants [w] [j] [ɹ] [l] Nasals [m] [n] [ŋ] Syllabic Consonants Practice your IPA transcription

Resources

1. Here is a Pronouncing Dictionary of 16,000 words of English
2. A list of practice passages - .pdf .odt .doc
3. The audio clips in this web page are from: Pitt, M.A., Dilley, L., Johnson, K., Kiesling, S., Raymond, W., Hume, E. and Fosler-Lussier, E. (2007) Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech (2nd release) Columbus, OH: Department of Psychology, Ohio State University (Distributor).
4. Donate to the UC Berkeley Linguistics Annual Fund to help support the hosting of this site.
5. Interested in Phonetics? Check out Phonwork.

© 2011 Keith Johnson & Erin Diehm