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

podcast. My name is Mandy and this is our 57th episode. I hope you're enjoying the pitch

word podcasts because today I'm going to do another one. I'm going to compare

extra high pitch words with rising pitch words. Remember, a pitch word is an individual word

that a speaker chooses to set apart by raising or lowering the pitch of its stressed syllables.

Pitch words convey which word of a sentence is the most important and how to interpret the importance of that particular word.

So far, we've talked about high pitch words and extra high pitch-high-pitch words. A high-pitch word conveys information

new to the dialogue and guides the direction of the conversation. The stressed syllable of that

word is set at a higher pitch, louder, and for more time than the surrounding syllables and words.

Remember, a high-pitch word is given more emphasis than a stressed word.

I most recently talked about stressed words in episode 53 when I talked about phrasal verbs.

Let's get back to today's topic of comparing extra high pitch words to rising pitch words.

I told you last week that an extra high pitch word is used to magnify or dramatize a situation,

or to correct another speaker's assumption, or to verbally

defend themselves.

An extra high pitch words pitch is even higher than a high pitch words pitch.

Now let's add another kind of pitch word, the rising pitch words.

Rising pitch words are used to contrast something previously mentioned or to contradict something

previously mentioned.

Rising pitch words are called rising pitch words because the pitch rises during the stressed syllable of that word.

It's important to distinguish between an extra high pitch word and a rising pitch word because of the way we use each kind of word. Rising pitch words contrast something previously

said, which is a kind of correction, but not as defensive as an extra high pitch word. Remember how I said

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