A Longitudinal Study of Speech Acoustics in Older French Females

Analysis of the Filler Particle euh across Utterance Positions

Dados Bibliográficos

ID5900941
AutoresFuch (0000-0001-6751-9286, Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics, autor correspondente), Laura L Koenig (0000-0003-0155-7866, Adelphi University), Annette Gerstenberg (0000-0001-7647-6986, University of Potsdam)
Ano2021
Volume6
Fascículo4
Páginas211
Data de publicação2021-12-20
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoLanguages (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2226-471X • E-ISSN: 2226-471X
EditoraMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/languages6040211
OpenAlexW4200119245
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas1
Referências citadas73

Aging in speech production is a multidimensional process. Biological, cognitive, social, and communicative factors can change over time, stay relatively stable, or may even compensate for each other. In this longitudinal work, we focus on stability and change at the laryngeal and supralaryngeal levels in the discourse particle euh produced by 10 older French-speaking females at two times, 10 years apart. Recognizing the multiple discourse roles of euh, we divided out occurrences according to utterance position. We quantified the frequency of euh, and evaluated acoustic changes in formants, fundamental frequency, and voice quality across time and utterance position. Results showed that euh frequency was stable with age. The only acoustic measure that revealed an age effect was harmonics-to-noise ratio, showing less noise at older ages. Other measures mostly varied with utterance position, sometimes in interaction with age. Some voice quality changes could reflect laryngeal adjustments that provide for airflow conservation utterance-finally. The data suggest that aging effects may be evident in some prosodic positions (e.g., utterance-final position), but not others (utterance-initial position). Thus, it is essential to consider the interactions among these factors in future work and not assume that vocal aging is evident throughout the signal

Acoustics · Assertion · Audiology · Economics · Formant · Intonation (linguistics · Linguistics · Noise (video · Physics · Position (finance · Quality (philosophy · Speech recognition · Utterance · Vowel · Work (physics · Computer Science · Engineering · Medicine · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Psychology · Speech Recognition and Synthesis · Voice and Speech Disorders · Artificial Intelligence