The present study is an experimental phonetic analysis of the Americans' prosodic characteristics depending on different ages, the experimental part of which is devoted to consideration of melodic peculiarities of American speech. The research topic is determined by the fact that the influence of personally related factors, namely the age of a person, on the process of speech production hasn't received a sufficiently complete consideration during previous studies, since it did not constitute a

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... ubject of special studying. This research correlates with sociophonetics, which studies phonetic characteristics of human speech behavior in various social groups and social situations. The choice of the American variant of the English language as the research material is explained by the greatest prevalence of this variant in the world community. The aim of the study is to identify the most frequent melodic configurations and temporal features of Americans' speech representing four age groups (adolescence, youth, maturity, old age), as well as in determining the internal relationship between the prosody of sounding speech and the main stages of personality's development and socialization. The subject of the study can be defined as the dynamics of change melodic and temporal design of Americans' speech in depending on the age of the speaker. A comprehensive research method combining a theoretical-analytical method, an audit, a comparative method and a method for correlating data obtained during the experiment, as well as their linguistic interpretation, is applied in the work in full. The main conclusion of our study is the confirmation of the fact that for each age there is its own specificity of prosodic formulation of an utterance, which is expressed in a certain set of melodic features typical for the speech of representatives of a particular age group. We can state that the dynamics of prosodic changes in a person's speech throughout his life does indeed take place, and it is due to biological, psychological and social factors. Human personality is a complex unity of the above-mentioned components, which are in a constant interaction and have a direct impact on the individual's speech behavior. Consequently, the study of the process of speech production and the identification of its specifics at a certain stage of a person's life is possible only with an integrated approach to the study of personality, taking into account all the variety of factors affecting it.