Many phonologists have pointed out that, in achieving intelligibility, the correct placing of stress is actually more important than the accuracy of the sounds we utter. The eminent A.C. Gimson exemplified this by saying that if in a restaurant we want to ask for potatoes and say something like beDEdos, the waiter is likely to understand no matter how deformed our vowels are, but if we moved the stress onto the first syllable and ordered BOdedos or BEdedos, he would be puzzled.
Let’s try:
May I have some bededos, please? Sure! It’ll be right up!
May I have some bededos, please? What the heck is that???
It is clear that keeping the correct stress pattern is vital for making yourself understood in English. Gimson and others thought so and therefore they concluded that the teaching of stress –that is, where the stress goes in words and sentences- has to be a high priority in English class.
I couldn’t agree more. And, as I see so many mistakes being made by Spanish speakers which are all down to the wrong placement of stress, I would like to contribute some comments to flesh out the idea.
Vowel quality
The first effect stress has is to determine the quality of the vowels in a word. Let’s see this famous example:
photograph /ˈfəʊtəgrɑːf/
photography /fəˈtɒgrəfi/
photographic /ˌfəʊtəˈgræfɪk/
We can easily observe how the vowels change on account of the main stress being placed on the first, second or third syllable.
| Word | Main Stress | Sequence of vowel phonemes | |||
| Photograph | Syllable 1 | ə | ɑː |
– |
|
| Photography | Syllable 2 | ɒ | ə | ||
| Photographic | Syllable 3 | ə | æ | ||
For more information about vowel sounds go here.
The conclusion is that to pronounce words correctly in English the first thing you need to know is where the stress goes in that word. And of course this isn’t something you’ll always be able to deduce. On many occasions -a lot of them, actually- you’ll have to look them up in a dictionary.
Typical Spanish mistakes
Even very advanced Spanish speakers of English make a mistake consisting of adopting the Spanish stress pattern of some verbs, which makes their speech sound absolutely non-English and might confuse their interlocutors. I’m sure you’ve heard it before. I’m talking about saying realIZE instead of REalize or communiCATE instead of coMMUnicate. Since the words are very similar, we assume that the stress is going to be in the same place. Unfortunately, it isnt’ like that at all.
Overall rhythm of the sentece
It is a well-known fact that keeping the correct rhythm is crucial if we want to sound natural and fluent in English. But this isn’t possible unless we know the stress pattern of individual words. Stressing the wrong syllable mangles the whole of it.
Now the good news!
The wonderful thing about stress is that it’s very easy to correct. The moment you know about it, you start doing it right. There’s nothing really complicated about it. So, the secret lies in that great word, awareness, or even knowledge. Again, knowing about things makes all the difference.
A final tip
Many years ago, I started reading literature in English and, as a writer myself, I was really worried about gettting the right sounds, rhythm and music of the language in my mind. So I began taking notes in phonetics whenever I had the slightest doubt about the pronunciation of a word. These jottings were at first really complicated -always the whole word transcribed-, but by and by I started narrowing them down, leaving out sounds which were obvious and focusing on the very important sounds and symbols. Nowadays, if I have to take a note like that I’m likely to mark just the stress. A single pencil mark before the right syllable and everything else falls into place.
Cheers,
Rodrigo Brunori