AGE PECULIARITIES OF THE AMERICANS’ MONOLOGICAL SPEECH

Abstract

The present study is an experimental phonetic analysis of the Americans’ prosodic characteristics depending on different ages, the experimental part of which is devoted to consideration of the peculiarities of melody and tempo of American speech. Prosody, in author’s opinion, is the study that understands phonetic suprasegmental characteristics of speech at the level of perception (pitch, loudness, duration) and at the physical level (FMT, intensity, time). In this meaning, prosody is contrasted with intonation, which denotes functional categories. The choice of the research topic is determined by the fact that the influence of personally related factors, namely the age of a person, on the process of speech production hasn’t received a sufficiently complete consideration during previous studies, since it did not constitute a subject of special studying. This research correlates with sociophonetics, which studies phonetic characteristics of human speech behavior in various social groups and social situations. The choice of the American variant of the English language as the research material is explained by the greatest prevalence of this variant in the world community. Speaking about the American version of the English language as a whole, it should be noted that its pronunciation standard is polycentric, due to the historical and geographical conditions of the existence of society. This option is described in sufficient details from the point of view of pronunciation features of vowels, consonants and tendencies of rhythmic and intonational organization of speech. The relevance of the topic of this article is determined by the fact that revealing the connection between prosodic syntagmatic design and speaker’s age characteristics is a necessary condition not only for a more complete and in-depth study of the process of mastering the native language, but also for the development of a student-centered approach to learning a foreign language. The aim of the study is to identify the most frequent melodic configurations and temporal features of Americans’ speech representing four age groups (adolescence, youth, maturity, old age), as well as in determining the internal relationship between the prosody of sounding speech and the main stages of personality’s development and socialization. The subject of the study can be defined as the dynamics of change melodic and temporal design of Americans’ speech in depending on the age of the speaker.