If English is your second language, you can use pitch and pausing to vastly increase your ability to be understood. A thought group is defined by speech specialist Judy Gilbert as follows:

‘When we speak, we need to divide speech up into small ‘chunks’ to help the listener understand messages. These chunks or thought groups are groups of words which go together to express an idea or thought. In English, we use pauses & pitch to mark thought groups.’

You can dramatically improve your English by pausing at the end of a thought and beginning the new thought with a different pitch. Take a look at these sentences and speak them out loud, taking a break at the end of the punctuation, and giving each new thought a change in pitch:

John said, “The boss is absent”.

“John,” said the boss “is absent”.

Lisa said, “My dog is intelligent.”

“Lisa”, said my dog “is intelligent”.

Notice something? These sentence pairs are identical; it is merely the punctuation, pausing, and intonation patterns that lend meaning.

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