TY  - JOUR
A1  - Fuchs, Susanne
A1  - Koenig, Laura L.
A1  - Gerstenberg, Annette
T1  - A longitudinal study of speech acoustics in older French females
BT  - analysis of the filler particle euh across utterance positions
JF  - Languages : open access journal
N2  - 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.
KW  - aging
KW  - prosody
KW  - voice quality
KW  - fundamental frequency
KW  - formants
KW  - filler
KW  - particles
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3390/languages6040211
SN  - 2226-471X
VL  - 6
IS  - 4
PB  - MDPI
CY  - Basel
ER  -