The volume, pitch, and stress of a word depends somewhat on where it falls in a sentence. Words at the end, even stressed words, tend to be less clear. Compare stressed words at the beginning with stressed words at the end with a helpful illustration.
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Today I’m going to go over something I find quite interesting about American English. And that is, how different the same word can sound depending on where it falls in a sentence. I’ve been noticing recently, some of my students from certain countries have the tendency to accent the last word in the sentence. And in general, American English goes down in pitch throughout a sentence. So actually the words at the end of a sentence should be lower in pitch, lower in volume, more unstressed than the same word would be if it came earlier in the sentence.
Let’s take for example the word ‘home’ in the sentences ‘I’ll be home by three,’ ‘Last night I drove the car home.’ Let’s hear the word ‘home’ in the first sentence, ‘I’ll be home by three,’ repeated on a loop a few times to get it into our ear. I’ll be home by three. Home, home, home, home. And now the second sentence, ‘Last night I drove the car home.’ Last night I drove the car home. Home, home, home, home. And now let’s compare, switching back and forth. [Home x8] Clearly they are at two different pitches, two different volumes.
Here I’m using the software program Pratt to view both sentences and the loops of the word ‘home’. The first sentence, I’ll be home by three. And the loop for the word home in that sentence: home, home, home. You can see that the volume is greater compared to the word home in the second sentence: home, home, home.
And down here we see the pitch. Both of these sentences have the downward trend, the second one ending with this little dot down here, as most statements in English do. The word ‘home’ in the first sentence, here, quite high in pitch, the word home in the second sentence, here, quite low in pitch. Home. This section up here is the M, sort of just a grumble in the voice. It sort of stops sounding like speech at this point, doesn’t it? Home, home, home. It’s so low in pitch, so low in volume, so — uhh — far down in the throat. Yet, when you hear it in the context of the sentence, you do identify it as the word ‘home.’ Let’s listen one more time to the loop, where we alternate the word ‘home’ from the two sentences. [Home x 8]
So keep this in mind when you’re speaking, when you’re practicing reading out loud. Make sure you’re not stressing the last word of a sentence by bringing it up in pitch or making it louder because in English it’s actually the opposite. The words at the end of the sentence will be lower in pitch and also softer. The final word in a sentence can sometimes be very low and very soft. That’s it, and thanks so much for using Rachel’s English.