Rachel's Intro to Word Sress

If you've seen many of my videos, you've probably heard me refer to a syllable as being stressed or accented. Well, what does that mean? In American English, certain words have stress within a sentence, and certain syllables have stress within a word. And it is this stress that allows our ears to understand the meaning and also to pick up the important parts of the sentence. Let's take for example the word 'about'. 'About' has two syllables, one is stressed. Can you guess which one it is? About. It's the second syllable. What makes a syllable stressed? Well, about. uh, about. It is usually higher in pitch. About. Also, longer in duration. And it is this higher pitch and longer length that allows our ear to pick it up and understand what's being said. About.