ABSTRACT
The vowels and consonants of English are used to make the words of the language, so people need to know about the sound structure of words as well as that of individual sounds. It is possible to distinguish various degrees of syllable stress, although for transcription purposes people normally deal with only two: stressed and unstressed. However, it is often useful to recognize an intermediate level, giving people primary stress, secondary stress, and unstressed, as this can explain certain patterns of vowel reduction seen in English. Interestingly, English has a set of word pairs with identical or very similar pronunciations, where one of the pair has first-syllable primary stress and the other has second-syllable primary stress. Identifying word stress patterns is an important skill for the speech-language pathologist. Transcribing ability at the segmental level is clearly necessary for the identification of segmental level errors, but errors with suprasegmentals, including word stress, also occur.
