PITCH AND TEMPORAL PECULIARITIES OF TEENAGERS’ SPEECH IN BRITISH AND AMERICAN ENGLISH

Abstract

The present study intends to investigate the prosodic features of British and American Teenagers’ Speech. The concept of age, being universal, is the basis of social existence and has cultural specificity. Age determines a person’s place in society and workplace, and reaching certain age leads to new obligations, rights and social roles. Thus, a person’s age characteristics reflect the movement along an individual life trajectory and compliance with social norms. The speech of young people is an interesting linguistic phenomenon and has certain intonation features, special accentuation. Among the prosodic features of the speech of young people, the strengthening of the affricate, vowel stretching, ascending or descending of intonation in certain parts of the syntagm are noted. Studies of young people’s speech show that deviations from normative variants of intonation patterns are becoming a fairly common phenomenon. The work uses a complex methodology of analysis and processing of language material, which includes the method of building intonation curves, instrumental phonetic analysis, and statistical method of data processing. Audio recordings of spontaneous speech of 24 teenagers, of which 12 British and 12 American boys and girls aged 14 to 17, have served as the research material. The total duration of the audio recordings is 33 minutes. Common and distinctive pitch and temporal characteristics that mark the speech of two groups of teenagers have been established. The speech of British teenagers is marked by: a wider pitch range, a slower tempo of speech, i.e. a lower speech rate and articulation rate, greater pause saturation and average duration of pauses, the predominance of short pauses and pauses of medium duration. The speech of American teenagers is determined by: a narrower pitch range, a faster tempo of speech, i.e. a higher speech rate and articulation rate, less pause saturation, the prevalence short pauses compared to the speech of British teenagers.