Don’t Stress About Word Stress!

Written by: Laura Janzen / Accent Modification / June 09, 2021 / 10 minutes read

Do you want to modify your accent in order to sound more like a native speaker of English? Do you notice the pattern of your speech sounds different from that of native speakers despite correctly pronouncing the words? Well, you are not alone! In my practice, what I often find, is that non-native English speakers can sometimes focus too much on individual sounds without also understanding intonation and stress patterns. Sentence intonation is a key piece of the puzzle when working on English pronunciation and contributes to sounding natural and fluent.

Before we dive into what the different stress patterns are, let’s talk about what some of these terms mean.

What is stress?

When certain syllables or words are stressed, this means they are longer, louder and slightly higher in pitch then the unstressed syllables. Stress in speech creates a more dynamic and interesting delivery.

What is intonation?

Intonation refers to the stress patterns across an entire sentence and is more simply defined as the rising and falling pitches across a sentence. By using more varied intonation, speech becomes more interesting. Monotonous speakers lack intonation changes in their speech and are often described as boring and difficult to listen to. 

The end of a sentence can either have rising or falling intonation. Rising intonation is used in questions. When rising intonation is used to end all sentences, this type of speech pattern is referred to as uptalk (https://www.torontospeechtherapy.com/blog/2020/what-is-uptalk?rq=uptalk) . Falling intonation, also referred to as assertive intonation is used to indicate finality in a statement. To learn more about how to sound assertive, check out the assertive communication course (link course)

Types of Word Stress

There four basic types of word stress that lead to proper intonation in English. These include: Tonic stress, Emphatic stress, Contrastive stress and New information stress.

Sentence intonation is a key piece of the puzzle when working on English pronunciation and contributes to sounding natural and fluent.

Tonic Stress

Speech is made up of intonation units, which refer to chunks of speech between pauses. Tonic stress refers to the syllable that receives the strongest stress in an intonation unit. There will only be one tonic stress in each intonation unit. A sentence can have multiple intonation units, meaning each sentence may have more than one tonic stress. The final tonic stress within a sentence typically receives the most stress.

Below is a sentence with 3 intonation units in which the syllable which receives the tonic stress is bolded:

• She's waiting.

• She's waiting / for her mother

• She's waiting / for her mother / at the bookstore

In the final example, 'book’ receives the most stress

In longer words, certain syllables will be stressed and this stress can change based on the type of word. For example, “Project” with Pro stressed refers to the noun, while “project” with “ject” stressed refers to the action of projecting. To learn more about stress patterns in words check out this article on prosody.

Emphatic Stress

If you want to emphasize a specific word or element in a sentence, you can shift the main stress to an adjective (huge, amazing etc.) or intensifier (really, very, etc.) This emphasis will draw attention to the remarkable aspect of what you want to communicate.

For example:

• That was an unusual house. - Standard statement

• That was an unusual house. - Emphasizes how strange the house was

Adverbs and modifiers also receive emphatic stress such as:

• Extremely

• Terribly

• Completely

• Utterly

• Especially

Contrastive Stress

Contrastive stress is used to highlight the difference between two things when comparing. Contrastive stress can be used with determiners such as 'this, that, these and those'.

For example:

• I like this design more.

• Do you want these shoes or those shoes?

Contrastive stress is also used to bring out a given word in a sentence which will also slightly change the meaning.

John didn’t steal Sam’s car (John stole someone else’s car)

John didn’t steal Sam’s car (Someone else stole Sam’s car)

To speak with one of the speech-language pathologists at Well Said: Toronto Speech Therapy, schedule an initial consultation by clicking the link below or calling (647) 795-5277.