Exercise 2.4

It is best if you use your own recordings for this exercise, as you will learn more by making, transcribing and analysing the recording yourself. But if you can't do this, then here are some brief recordings of spontaneous and read speech, together with their transcriptions:

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Yes I went from sleepy old Wellington to the great bustle of Rome via I think the longest route ever that anyone has taken from New Zealand to Australia cos I got a cheap a cheap air fare which involved me going via Amsterdam to get to Rome also via Singapore and most of the known world

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Young Britons are adopting a pattern of speech that makes them sound more like Australians. Their tone of voice raises towards rises towards the end of a sentence, as if an unanswered question were left hanging. To the ears of the older generation it can jar, because the intonation appears to be in the wrong place.

You should find, whether you use the recordings here or your own recordings, that there is a much better match between the locations of pauses and the locations of punctuation marks in the read speech than in the spontaneous speech. Why?

If you want to download the files for opening in a speech editor, then click on the following links for spontaneous speech, and read speech (both are '.mp3' files).