A Longitudinal Study of Speech Acoustics in Older French Females: Analysis of the Filler Particle euh across Utterance Positions

Abstract

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.

L’âge avancé en perspective longitudinale et ses outils : LangAge, un corpus au pluriel

“…Pour les études destinées à analyser les profils sociolinguistiques classiques, ces entretiens n'ont pas été inclus dans l'échantillon. Par contre, au sein de LangAge, des échantillons peuvent être constitués pour des études individuelles, permettant de retracer des parcours supra-individuels et individuels à différents niveaux linguistiques (Kairet 2019, Fuchs et al 2021). Au lieu de limiter l'analyse du langage de l'âge avancé à une évaluation en termes de maintien ou de diminution des performances cognitives, l'interaction entre les différentes compétences linguistiques et la prise en compte des contextes et usages sont au centre des intérêts.…”