Sound Pattern of Spoken English

Most people speaking their native language do not notice either the sounds that they produce or the sounds that they hear. They focus directly on the meaning of the input and output: the sounds serve as a channel for the information, but not as a focus in themselves (cf. Brown 1977: 4–5) This is obviously the most efficient way to
communicate. If we were to allow a preoccupation with sounds to get in the way of understanding, we would seriously handicap our interactions. One consequence of this opacity of the sound medium is that our notion of how we pronounce words and longer utterances can be very different from what we actually say. Take a sentence like ‘And the suspicious cases were excluded.’Whereas a speaker of English might well think they are saying:...Download the book here.