A Comprehensive Analysis of Age and Gender Effects in European Portuguese Oral Vowels

The knowledge about the age effects in speech acoustics is still disperse and incomplete. This study extends the analyses of the effects of age and gender on acoustics of European Portuguese (EP) oral vowels, in order to complement initial studies with limited sets of acoustic parameters, and to fur...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of voice 2023-01, Vol.37 (1), p.143.e13-143.e29
Main Authors: Albuquerque, Luciana, Oliveira, Catarina, Teixeira, António, Sa-Couto, Pedro, Figueiredo, Daniela
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic
Adult
Aged
Aged, 80 and over
Aging voice
European Portuguese
Female
Humans
Language
Male
Middle Aged
Oral vowel
Phonetics
Portugal
Speech
Speech Acoustics
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Summary:The knowledge about the age effects in speech acoustics is still disperse and incomplete. This study extends the analyses of the effects of age and gender on acoustics of European Portuguese (EP) oral vowels, in order to complement initial studies with limited sets of acoustic parameters, and to further investigate unclear or inconsistent results. A database of EP vowels produced by a group of 113 adults, aged between 35 and 97, was used. Duration, fundamental frequency (f0), formant frequencies (F1 to F3), and a selection of vowel space metrics (F1 and F2 range ratios, vowel articulation index [VAI] and formant centralization ratio [FCR]) were analyzed. To avoid the arguable division into age groups, the analyses considered age as a continuous variable. The most relevant age-related results included: vowel duration increase in both genders; a general tendency to formant frequencies decrease for females; changes that were consistent with vowel centralization for males, confirmed by the vowel space acoustic indexes; and no evidence of F3 decrease with age, in both genders. This study has contributed to knowledge on aging speech, providing new information for an additional language. The results corroborated that acoustic characteristics of speech change with age and present different patterns between genders.
ISSN:0892-1997
1873-4588
DOI:10.1016/j.jvoice.2020.10.021