Exploring the Age Effects on European Portuguese Vowel Production: An Ultrasound Study

Luciana Albuquerque,Catarina Oliveira,Samuel Silva,António Teixeira,Fábio Barros,Ana Rita Valente,Paula Martins

doi:10.3390/app12031396

Luciana Albuquerque, Catarina Oliveira + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/app12031396

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Abstract

For aging speech, there is limited knowledge regarding the articulatory adjustments underlying the acoustic findings observed in previous studies. In order to investigate the age-related articulatory differences in European Portuguese (EP) vowels, the present study analyzes the tongue configuration of the nine EP oral vowels (isolated context and pseudoword context) produced by 10 female speakers of two different age groups (young and old). From the tongue contours automatically segmented from the US images and manually revised, the parameters (tongue height and tongue advancement) were extracted. The results suggest that the tongue tends to be higher and more advanced for the older females compared to the younger ones for almost all vowels. Thus, the vowel articulatory space tends to be higher, advanced, and bigger with age. For older females, unlike younger females that presented a sharp reduction in the articulatory vowel space in disyllabic sequences, the vowel space tends to be more advanced for isolated vowels compared with vowels produced in disyllabic sequences. This study extends our pilot research by reporting articulatory data from more speakers based on an improved automatic method of tongue contours tracing, and it performs an inter-speaker comparison through the application of a novel normalization procedure.

Highlights

Aging involves changes at physiological, cognitive, psychological, and social levels.Age impacts the human body in a plethora of ways, entailing changes to the musculoskeletal, the cardiovascular, the respiratory, and the central nervous systems [1], and the speech production system is no exception [2]
Due to the fact that the vowel formant values are suited to articulatory interpretations, formant measurements have been used in the study of speech production
Albuquerque et al [16,18] observed that vowel formants tend to decrease mainly in females and to centralize in males with aging, and these changes might be related to specific articulatory adjustments of the older speakers during speech

Summary

Introduction

Aging involves changes at physiological, cognitive, psychological, and social levels.Age impacts the human body in a plethora of ways, entailing changes to the musculoskeletal, the cardiovascular, the respiratory, and the central nervous systems [1], and the speech production system is no exception [2]. Albuquerque et al [16,18] observed that vowel formants tend to decrease mainly in females and to centralize in males with aging, and these changes might be related to specific articulatory adjustments of the older speakers during speech. Noticeable anatomic and physiologic changes in the vocal tract or supralaryngeal system have been reported from young adulthood to old age [29]. During this period, facial bones continue to grow (3–5%) [29]. The shape of the oral cavity may change with the loss of teeth and the introduction of dentures [35]

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