MIGRANTS’ SPEECH: FORMANT DESCRIPTION

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to identify acoustic parameters of the vocable speech of migrants with the help of a sound analyzer PRAAT based on a speaker’s reference utterance that included all vowels of the Russian language. Men from different countries of the world, aged from 30 to 35 years, with similar voice timber participated in the experiment. All of them had studied the Russian language for not less than 2 years and had lived in Russia for not less than 1.5 years. The formant structure of the vowel sounds was investigated. The results of the survey allow us to correlate, first of all, the formant levels resulted from the experiment with the average levels described in scientific literature on phonetics; secondly, to feature phonetic processes typical for the survey’s participants during their speech utterance. The results of the experiment allow us to conclude that the formant parameters of the Russian vowels vary depending on formant parameters of the corresponding sound in the native language of a particular informant, wherein a specific correlation has been also noted related to the family of languages that includes the informant’s native language.

Keywords

• phonetics
• formant
• speech
• vowels
• migrants