Abstract
The present study reports phonetic data applicable for diagnostic purposes in voice related pathologies. However, apart from purely physiological concern, linguistic considerations are also acknowledged since the speech material consists of a continuous spoken text. Three age groups of speakers were recorded (young, middle-aged and old adults), each represented by 15 men and 15 women (n = 90). Several measures of fundamental frequency, together with variation in intensity and speech tempo were captured. An appreciably innovative metric, Cumulative Slope Index (CSI), was successfully employed to capture F0 variability in utterances. The results confirm differences between the age groups, but also between men and women, and contribute the normative mapping of the Czech population.
Highlights
The speech modulation in the domains of the fundamental frequency, amplitude, timing and spectral setting has been shown throughout decades of linguistic research to encode multiple meanings in communication
As our primary interest was in the Cumulative Slope Index (CSI), which was an innovative metric designed to reflect variation in contours, we report it first
The stylized contours do not display the trend. This means that the crude melodic course which reflects the phonology of the language is not differentiating between older and younger speakers in terms of CSI, while the melodic movements that are outside phonology have discriminative power
Summary
The speech modulation in the domains of the fundamental frequency, amplitude, timing and spectral setting has been shown throughout decades of linguistic research to encode multiple meanings in communication. Language communities can be described in terms of groupings of the language users who share certain patterns of speech behaviour. These groups can be determined, for instance, by geographical region, education, socioeconomic class, gender or age. Each of such criteria provides interesting and eventually applicable information about the speakers’ habits both in the area of speech production and speech perception. The age criterion, for instance, may inform the fields of cognitive and developmental psychology, language and speech acquisition, and medical disciplines. If normal age-related changes are reliably described, pathological conditions that affect voice can be identified
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