English is a stress-timed language. This means native speakers naturally attempt to do two things:

• they stress particular words (usually content words; we learnt this earlier in the course during the section on "Stress")
• they try to keep an equal amount of time between the stressed sounds

Listen to the audio example below. Think about the following:

• Which words are stressed?
• Is the amount of time between the stressed words equal, more or less?

We heard an example in the video of a sentence with an equal amount of time between the stressed sounds. The stressed sounds will usually happen within the content words.

There are some situations were English speakers may do different things, though.

1) Short answers to questions

In very short answers, sometimes we:

• don't have enough content words to create rhythm
• want to emphasise a non-content word in our answer

Watch the next video for an example:

2) When we want to show we are thinking deeply about our words, or want to give strong emphasis (e.g. when giving a warning), we may slow down our speech and stress more words in a sentence.

In the next video, we compare two answers to a question: the first is said with normal sentence stress, and the second is said with stronger emphasis.

3) Sometimes, there are content words that are more important than others. In longer speeches, we may choose to only stress some of the content words:

• to increase speaking speed, or
• to bring greater emphasis to the most important words