An exploratory model of speech intelligibility for healthy aging based on phonatory and articulatory measures

Relationship between phoneme-level spectral acoustics and speech intelligibility in healthy speech: a systematic review

“…This reduced F2 slope difference indicated a lower consonant-induced coarticulation in the VCV syllable, thus a reduced consonant articulation. The use of formant transition measures is all the more noteworthy since it has been shown that in healthy ageing a decrease in intelligibility can be partly attributed to slower tongue movements (Kuruvilla-Dugdale et al, 2020).…”

“…Furthermore, there is a complex entanglement of segmental acoustic features with factors at other levels of granularity such as intonation, stress (e.g., acoustic differences between stressed and unstressed vowels in A19), voice quality and speech rate. This has been demonstrated in connected speech (Metz et al, 1990) as well as in clear speech (Kuruvilla-Dugdale et al, 2020;Smiljanić & Bradlow, 2009;Whitfield & Goberman, 2017). Eventually, before using segmental acoustic measures on specific patient populations, extensive research is still needed to get a better understanding of their behaviour in the healthy speakers, to identify relevant acoustic combinations that could account for perceived speech variations and to provide normative data from a large set of healthy speakers.…”

“…Also, while half of the studies were carried out on study groups aged more than 50 years, none of the studies investigated the impact of age in adults on the spectral measures or on perceived speech intelligibility. It would be noteworthy to take the age factor into account in order to analyse the evolution of speech-related acoustics and perceived intelligibility in normal ageing (Kuruvilla-Dugdale et al, 2020). Indeed, speech has been shown to vary across the lifespan due to physiological and neuromuscular modifications (Benjamin, 1997;Bilodeau-Mercure & Tremblay, 2016;Hazan, 2017;Hazan et al, 2018;Hooper & Cralidis, 2009;Tremblay et al, 2017).…”

“…An important question that arises is whether the imprecisions in healthy speech can be captured by acoustic-phonetic measures. Several studies, such as in healthy ageing (Hazan, 2017;Kuruvilla-Dugdale, Dietrich, McKinley, & Deroche, 2020), indicate that a large part of the variability in healthy speech is indeed 'traceable to specific acoustic-phonetic characteristics of the talker' (Bradlow, Torretta, & Pisoni, 1996;Metz, Schiavetti, Samar, & Sitler, 1990). The field of study of acoustic measurements in speech is vast, and we have chosen to conduct this systematic review on one of its aspects, the frequency-domain measures.…”

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

“…Regarding the tongue, age-related muscular changes include muscle atrophy [36], decreased thickness of the lingual epithelium, reduced muscle fiber diameter, and fissuring of the tongue surface [29,37]. Concerning the size of the tongue, contradictory findings have been reported in the literature [6].…”