ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the following questions: What are liaison, linking, transition, and juncture? How do transitions occur between syllables and between words in connected speech (CS)? What are close and open transitions? How do consonant-to-consonant transitions occur in CS? How do transitions involving consonants and vowels work in CS? How do vowel-to-vowel transitions occur in CS? Oral North American English, especially in CS, often seems to second language learners to be one continuous flow of sound. Instead of being pronounced separately and distinctly, words are connected together, and that is the topic of much of the rest of this book. This phenomenon has been observed for years, and it has been labeled using a number of different terms, such as liaison, linking, transition, and juncture.
