Аннотация:The study investigates indexical rhytmical features in the first dozen words in 102 American English adult speakers' telephone talks. The main goal is to explore age- and gender-related changes in prosodic characteristics of accented syllables (AS) and non-accented syllables (NAS) which affect speech rhythm in dialogue. The rhythm measures indicate duration, fundamental frequency and intensity, both mean values and PVI scores in adjacent syllables. The result suggest increasing accentual prominence achieved through growing values of foot and AS mean duration, increasing F0 range values, as well as higher PVI scores for F0 maxima values across three age groups. The accent-based (prototypical "stress-timed") pattern of English proves to be developing with age and varying with gender in AmE spontaneous speech.
Keywords: AmE, Dialogue, Speech, Rhythm, Age, Gender, Duration, Fundamental frequency, Intensity, Corpus study