VoxSenes Acoutic Database

Abstract

Motivated by the need to increase knowledge about the effect of age on speech production, and by the lack of speech data on European Portuguese (EP), this work focuses on the development of a speech database, with acoustic data of healthy adults using standardized recording procedures. The objective of this database is to support a comprehensive analysis of age and gender effects in EP speech at segmental and suprasegmental levels. In this vein, the present work provides the description of one acoustic speech database containing all EP vowels produced in similar context (reading speech), and also semi-spontaneous speech (image description) collected from a large sample of 144 adults from the central region of Portugal, between the ages 35 and 97. This paper summarizes the research design of the acoustic database and includes details about the study region, participants, participants’ tasks, corpus, data acquisition, and segmentation/annotation of the data. This database has been used in different studies, where various aspects of the aging speech were explored through different methods, such as static acoustic features and dynamic vowel formants. However, the collected data could be used on other acoustic studies of speech over the lifespan.