COMMUNICATIVE AND SYNTACTIC PECULIARITIES OF CHILDREN’S SPEECH IN THE GENRE OF INTERVIEW
The topicality of the research follows from both the generalfocus of modern linguistics on exploring correlations between all levels of language and the growing interest in the problem of ontogenesis in language studies. The object of the present research is the English speech of American children of the preschool and primary school age groups in Jimmy Kimmel’s comic talk show.The subject is its syntactic, lexical and phonetic peculiarities. There were used such methods of scientific research as observation, methods of measurement, comparison, perceptive analysis, deduction, induction, generalization, quantitative and qualitative analysis. The objective of our researchis to define and compare syntactic, lexical and phonetic peculiarities of children’s speech of the preschool and primary school age periods, accentuating their gender differences. The findings consist in identifying the differences in children’s speech within different age and gender groups that lie in the peculiarities of pronunciation and intonation, tempo and usage frequency of hesitation pauses on the level of phonetics. On the lexical level, we have discovered the absence of synonymic rows in the speech of both age categories, scarce use of stylistic devices, among which the most recurrent are repetitions, occasional words, metaphors and antitheses. The analysis of syntactic structure of children’s cues accentuating the interviewees’ gender shows that the younger the respondents are, the more often they tend to built-up answers codified in simple and non-predication structured sentences or elliptical constructions. There has also been defined the usage frequency of different structural and communicative sentence types as employed by children. Therefore, we can say that girls’ speech is better-developed and more complicated within both age-groups. The analysis of sentences according to their communicative types has shown that the communicator’s active or passive speech role depends not only on their individual temper and psychological features but also on their gender. The practical value of the research can consist in improving native and foreign language speech skills at an early age, and in generally granting a better understanding of children’s outlook.