Hi again and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast. My name is Amanda, and this is our 215th episode.

The last two episodes were about how to use pitch to ask very precise questions.

Hopefully, you learned that there can be more to the question than the question itself.

For instance, a yes-no question can be asking for a yes or no answer,

or maybe it's showing annoyance or impatience. Intonation matters. Today you'll learn that

dropping to a low pitch in the middle of a sentence lets listeners know that the information

provided is extra. It's like bonus material that isn't critical to the message, but is slipped in anyway.

If we were reading the information instead of hearing it, we'd probably see this content set

apart with commas or parentheses.

This will be easier to understand with examples.

So, in the sentence, Mrs. Roso, my daughter's teacher, asked me to call her this afternoon.

The middle part of that sentence, my daughter's teacher, was the extra bit of information, and I said it at a lower pitch than the rest of the sentence. Non-critical information

that we add to sentences are called asides. Since we use a low pitch to begin an aside, we call this

intonation pattern a low aside. I'll say the sentence again. Notice that the phrase, my daughter's teacher,

begins with a low pitch. Mrs. Rousseau, my daughter's teacher, asked me to call her this afternoon.

There were two other features that you may have noticed in the sentence.

First, there was a pause before the aside and at the end of the aside.

Second, the aside had a pitch word of its own.

The pitch went up again on the word teacher.

If you've been studying intonation, you might be saying to yourself,

Wait a second. This all sounds very similar to an intonation unit.

If you caught that, congratulations. You are an advanced learner of pitch and intonation.

...