Zinchenko O. Phonetic Parameters of Men’s and Women’s Oral Speech (An Experimental Phonetic Study of German Spontaneous Speech)

This thesis focuses on the realization of intonation components and their influence on the vowel phonemes’ functioning in spontaneous German speech. The ways of functional division are established via determination of phonetic parameters. Women’s speech has been proved to possess a greater degree of melodic contour truncating, accentuation periodicity, rhythmicality and regularity of intervals between stressed syllables, a more categorical manner of speaking, and the usage of psychological pauses after rheme. Men’s speech is characterized by the equable tone realization, less frequent accentuation, lesser degree of rhythmicality, non-regularity of inter-stressed intervals, and the usage of psychological pauses before rheme.It has been revealed that intonation components’ realization in theme and rheme causes modification of both stressed and unstressed vowels. Prosodic components’ manifestation in women’s speech causes greater modifications of vowel phonemes in theme and rheme. Vowels produced by men are less modified.