Abstract
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.
Highlights
Human aging is a multidimensional process that impacts anatomy, physiology, linguistic properties, communication, and cognition
While Duez (2001) found speaker specific and relatively stable f0 values independent of the position in an utterance for French, Shriberg and Lickley (1993) found that f0 values for clause-internal fillers in English were dependent on the preceding f0 peak, i.e., they were sensitive to prosodic context
The comparability is limited, as varying observations for f0 might arise from typological differences of the analyzed languages, and from differences in the annotation scheme with the respective exclusion or inclusion criteria accounting for prosodic position
Summary
Human aging is a multidimensional process that impacts anatomy, physiology, linguistic properties, communication, and cognition. Authors have given considerable attention to the effects of menopause (see summary in Lenell et al 2019) This raises the question of whether we can still trace vocal aging in older females (beyond their 60’s) or if patterns are relatively stable. Smorenburg and Heeren (2020) observed that speaker specific information varied with phonological and syllabic context and Weirich (2012) found that physiological aspects in speech production were visible in unstressed syllables, but not in stressed ones. These findings indicate that speaker information in speech sounds is not necessarily the same across linguistic contexts and prosodic positions
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