GENDER SPECIFICITY OF AGE-RELATED PITCH CHANGESIN AMERICAN DIALOGUE SPEECH
The article is devoted to age and gender variability of pitch characteristics in American English dialogue speech. A brief overview regarding the patterns and causes of prosody change in speech depending on speakers’ age and gender and occurring alongside with biological, physiological, psychological and social development of people is given. The results of the experimental research in fundamental frequency measures, conducted by the autnor, revealed the following gender and age prosodic features of American English dialogue speech: first, American women’s speech is characterised by age-related drop in fundamental frequency values in contrast to men’s speech that remains relatively stable in this aspect; second, the revealed growth in fundamental frequency PVI measures together with the pitch range extension with increasing age testify to the occurrence of compensatory changes in elder Americans’ speech that develop to make up for speech qualities deteriorated due to physiolocical losses; third, the contrast of strong speech elements against the weak ones due to pitch variability growth is significantly increasing in middle-aged speakers compared to young generation and is retained in old people’s speech that also indicates the improvement of speaking skills of middle-aged Americans and the presence of compensatory strategy in old-aged Americans’ speech.