THE WORDS AND SOUNDS OF TELEPHONE CONVERSATION 309 



of the words which are met with great frequency. The present 

 methods of teaching the spoken language no doubt approximate to 

 this, as a result of experience. It is suggested that the present word 

 list, which contains the words used so frequently as to form 96 per cent 

 of the total number observ^ed in this study, provides a guide for the 

 selection of important words to be taught. Additions are needed to 

 the list as it stands, in order to care for certain obvious situations not 

 encountered in telephone conversation concerning, for example, hotels, 

 restaurants and trains. With these points in mind, the list given has 

 the advantage of being founded on a study of actual conversation. 



Syllables 



As a preliminary to analysis of the words into their component sounds 

 the words were divided into syllables. With regard to the fact that 

 the study concerned conversation the division was made on phonetic 

 lines, which, as unabridged dictionaries show, differ from the ortho- 

 graphical divisions. Likewise a few words such as "every," "prefer- 

 ence," "average" and the like were divided into two syllables, accord- 

 ing to the usual colloquial pronunciation. 



TABLE VI 

 The Syllabic Structure of Coxversatioxal Vocabulary 



In Table VI a summary is given of the syllabic structure of words, 

 based on the total occurrence of the words. It may be noticed that 

 words longer than two syllables make up only a trifle more than 4 

 per cent of the words observed. Nouns tend to be more polysyllabic 

 than other classes, but even so the nouns having more than two sylla- 

 bles occur so infrequently as to form only 13 per cent of all the nouns 

 observed. 



The types of phonetic syllables which are found range in complexity 

 from a single vowel through various combinations of consonants with 

 a vowel. The relative number of the different types is shown in Table 

 \'II. The letters V and C represent "vowel" and "consonant," 



