Articulation and acoustic characteristics of unstressed and stressed vowels in place of the spelling "a" in the speech of native speakers of different phonovariants of the Russian language

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the study of the peculiarities of the implementation of vowel sounds, realized in place of the spelling "a" in the speech of native speakers of various phonovariants of the Russian language. The scientific novelty of the work lies in an integrated approach to the analysis of the variability of pronunciation of these vowels, including an acoustic analysis of formant characteristics, calculation of the Levenshtein distance between pairs of vowels, as well as analysis of the duration of vowel sounds. Such a multidimensional analysis allows us to identify subtle phonetic differences in the implementation of vowels in the speech of native speakers of different regional variants of the Russian language. The aim of the study is to identify the features of the implementation of vowels in place of the spelling "a" in stressed and unstressed positions in the speech of students who are native speakers of various phonovariants of the Russian language. The study revealed a number of trends in the implementation of vowel sounds in the speech of informants from different regions. It was found that the stressed and unstressed ‘a’ after hard and soft consonants is realized with a tendency to more open vowels in the central and northern regions, it was also found that the duration of unstressed vowels in the southern regions is shorter, comparatively with the central ones. Additional studies involving more data are planned to further confirm the trends.