SPECIFIC FEATURES OF SPEECH PAUSING FOR DIFFERENT AGE GROUPS IN THE FAR EAST

Abstract

The article presents the results of auditory and instrumental types of analysis aimed at studying the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of pauses in spontaneous speech of Far Eastern residents of various age groups. The data are audio recordings of the spontaneous speech of Blagoveshchensk female residents of three age groups: adolescents 11-13 years old, young people 20-25 years old, elderly people (60-65 years old). The audio was recorded on WhatsApp application. The first stage included the calculation of all the speakers’ pauses. Analysis of the pauses made it possible to group them in accordance with the existing classifications. From the total amount of data received, hesitation pauses were selected and divided into filled and unfilled ones. Instrumental analysis found out the types of filled pauses: vocalization, sound elongation, pauses of verbal search and non-verbal hesitation, self-correction pauses. In most cases vocalization is presented by the use of [a], [ɛ] and [m] sounds. The most frequent vocalized filler used by adolescents is [a] sound, by elderly people is [ɛ] sound. Sound elongation is mainly represented by the lengthening of [i] in conjunctions. The pauses of the verbal search are filled with junk words - young people tend to use them more often than other groups of speakers. Moreover, young people tend to use more filled pauses than adolescents and elderly people - the number of such pauses in their speech is 66%. Measurement of the average duration of pauses made it possible to conclude that this parameter increases with the age of the speakers - the younger the speaker, the shorter the pauses in his speech and vice versa.