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

My name is Mandy, and this is our 56th episode.

Last week, I started talking about intonation and pitch, and I'm going to continue on that topic for a while yet.

As a review, intonation is the use of pitch, and pitch is the way we make our voice go up and down, like we do when we're singing.

Everything I'm talking about in these podcasts is also available in our new book, Rhythm and Intonation of American English,

which you can pre-buy as an e-book through April 18th for only $28. After that, the price goes up. I was told last week that I should

mention again that you do not need to be in the United States to purchase the e-book. You can download it

from any country that you can download this podcast from. So, as long as

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Now let's get back to intonation and pitch. At Pronuncian and Seattle Learning Academy,

we break the study of intonation and pitch apart into three categories, pitch words, pitch

boundaries, and starting pitches. Last week, I talked about high-pitch words, which have the following characteristics.

They convey information new to the dialogue.

They guide the direction of the conversation.

Their stressed syllable is said at a higher pitch than the syllables

that surround it, and their stressed syllable is usually said louder and for more time than

surrounding syllables and words. This week, I'm going to talk about extra high pitch words.

...