How to Pronounce: Stress and listening - Artificial intelligence

Hello! I'm John Russell.

Today we will build our pronunciation skills by doing an exercise that involves listening.

Why is listening important for speaking?

Well, if you cannot hear or identify differences in speech, then you will have a hard time

producing those differences when you speak. Here is the exercise.

We are going to pay careful attention to content words and function words.

Content words are nouns and verbs, words that carry the most meaning.

Function words are grammatical words, prepositions, articles, and so on.

English speakers generally stress content words and reduce function words.

Read the sentence, then consider which words are content and which are function words.

Now listen to me as I read the sentence.

Note that I will read it slowly and exaggerate my language.

Can you identify the content words?

As artificial intelligence has developed, the meaning of AGI has changed over time.

Here are the content words I said louder.

Artificial intelligence developed meaning AGI changed time.

Now I will read the entire sentence a bit more naturally.

As artificial intelligence has developed, the meaning of AGI has changed over time.

So to recap, the idea is to develop creative ways to stress content words. That's all for today.

Keep up the good work!