Hi everyone and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast.

My name is Mandy, and this is our 32nd episode.

The past two episodes were about syllable stress, and today I'm going to continue

with that theme. I'm spending a lot of time talking about syllable stress because it really is a big

deal. If you continually stress the wrong syllable while speaking, your listeners will undoubtedly miss parts of what you are saying.

And if you don't use syllable stress correctly, it will also mess up how you use intonation

because intonation relates directly to stressed syllables.

I will eventually get into shows specifically about

intonation. First today, let's review everything we learned so far about syllable stress.

We learned the two-syllable word rule. It said that we will stress the first syllable of two-syllable

nouns, adjectives, and adverbs, and that we will stress the second syllable of two-syllable

verbs. It isn't always true, but it is often true.

Then we learned that suffixes, those short endings added to the words, may dictate which

syllable receives the stress.

So far we only learned suffixes that caused the syllable before the suffix to take the stress. Those were the T-I-O-N-S-I-N

suffix and the I-C suffix. We also learned that when we add the AL and A-L-L-Y suffix to those

suffixes, the stress stays in the same place it was before the secondary

suffix was added.

Let's review our examples from the last two weeks.

First, the T-I-O-N-S-I-O-N suffix.

Remember, we stress the word on the syllable before the T-I-O-N or S-I-O-N suffix. Remember, we stress the word on the syllable before the T-I-O-N or S-I-O-N, even when A-L or A-L-L-Y is also added to the word.

Listen to the syllable stress in the word profession. It is on the fesh syllable of the word.

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