What is vowel reduction in English?

What is vowel reduction in English?

In phonetics, vowel reduction is any of various changes in the acoustic quality of vowels, which are related to changes in stress, sonority, duration, loudness, articulation, or position in the word (e.g. for the Creek language), and which are perceived as "weakening". It most often makes the vowels shorter as well.

What are the weak vowels in Spanish?

We saw in an earlier lesson that of the five vowels in Spanish, three (a, e, and o) are considered strong vowels. The other two (i and u) are considered weak vowels. We also saw that a combination of a weak vowel and a strong vowel forms one syllable, called a diphthong.

What is a weak form?

Weak forms are syllable sounds that become unstressed in connected speech and are often then pronounced as a schwa. In the sentence below the first 'do' is a weak form and the second is stressed. Counting the number of words in a sentence, or sentence dictations can help raise awareness of weak forms.

How many weak vowels does banana have?

You might expect from looking at the word banana, for example, that it would have three identical vowel sounds, but it turns out that the stressed second syllable has the vowel /ɑ:/, while the unstressed first and third syllables have /ə/.