Acoustic analysis of the unstressed vocalism modifications in the English speech of Ukrainians

Abstract

The methodology of unstressed vocalism prosodic features research presupposes acoustic analysis of vowelsinweak positions, pronounced by the native speaker and Ukrainians with different levels of English were studiedfor stating speech deviations in connected speech. At the stage of acoustic analysis in order to compare hownaturally the speech sounds and if it corresponds received pronunciation, the frequency diapason of rhythmicgroups and the words, selected for analysis was investigated. Also, indexes of unstressed vowels spectralcharacteristics were analyzed in the speech of Ukrainians with different levels of English. As a result of phoneticexperimental research, it was proved that in foreign speech speakers without special education and enoughexperience of speaking a foreign language, refer to phonetic rules of their native language, assimilatingthe pronunciation of unstressed sounds to similar sounds of the native language. So, it can be stated, that nativespeakers of Ukrainian will have common deviations in the system of unstressed vocalism. The received datapersuasively prove the assimilation of the pronunciation of unstressed vowel phoneme allophones in the Englishspeech of Ukrainians to their full variants of the native language. Such deviations, in their turn, influenceprosodic characteristics of speech, making the understanding of the content more difficult. During the researchthe dependence of the number and level of speech deviations on the level of language acquisition, education andthe experience of communication was stated. Thus, the set of speech deviations on the segmental level specificfor Ukrainian speakers was identified and their influence on prosodic features of the English speech was proved.