Connected Speech – Junctures

Try saying the sentence ‘I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice-cream.’ Although the phonemes involved in the underlined words are the same, subtle differences help us tell the action of ‘screaming‘ from the dessert ‘ice cream‘. The same subtle differences in the use of phonemes are also found in the underlined words in the following two sentences:

The clock keeps ticking. / k iː p s t ɪ k ɪ ŋ /
The kids keep sticking things on the wall. / k iː p s t ɪ k ɪ ŋ /

The differences in the pronunciation of the underlined words, despite the fact that the phonemes are the same, are differences of juncture. A deeper analysis of such examples would show differences in the length of vowel sounds, variations in degrees of syllable stress, differently timed articulation of the consonant sounds and allophonic variations too. So, while the phonemes may be the same, listeners have no difficulty (most of the time) in telling where the join is, and context clearly plays a role here. Other examples showing the same phenomenon are:

That’s my train. / m aɪ t r eɪ n /
It might rain. / m aɪ t r eɪ n /
The great apes / g r eɪ t eɪ p s /
The grey tapes /g r eɪ t eɪ p s /

In the pair:

Can I have some more ice? / m ɔː r aɪ s /
Can I have some more rice? / m ɔː r aɪ s /

The linking / r / could lead to confusion over juncture, but again context and subtle differences in articulation help us to judge which one we have heard.

Consonants often seem to be attracted across word boundaries:

You’ll need an egg, an olive and an anchovy. ( … a negg, a nolive and a nanchovy)
Put it on. (pu ti ton)

The negg, nolive and nanchovy are obviously non-words, but occasionally the coincidence of sounds can lead to examples where listeners may hear an unintended word:

It’s no joke. {snow)
It’s tough. {stuff)

A famous example concerns a misheard lyric from the Jimi Hendrix song ‘Purple Haze’, where the line ‘Scuse me, while I kiss the sky was heard as ‘Scuse me, while I kiss this guy‘. Assimilation also plays a role here, in the assimilation of the / k / in sky to a / g /.