Disfluencies in spontaneous speech in easy and adverse communicative situations: the effect of age

Abstract

Disfluencies are a pervasive feature of speech communication. Their function in communication is still widely discussed with some proposing that their usage might aid understanding. Accordingly, talkers may produce more disfluencies when conversing in adverse communicative situations, e.g. in background noise. Moreover, increasing age may have an effect on disfluency use as older adults report particular difficulties when communicating in adverse conditions. In this study, we elicited spontaneous speech via a problem-solving task from four different age groups (19-76 years old) to investigate the effect of energetic and informational maskers on the use of filled pauses (FPs), and its interaction with age. Measures of disfluency rates, effort ratings, and communication efficiency were obtained. Results show that, against our predictions, FP usage may decrease in adverse conditions. Moreover, age does not play a great role in adults with normal hearing. The results indicate that individuals differ greatly in their disfluency adaptations, utilising different strategies to overcome challenging communicative situations

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

“…As expected, based on prior work using the LangAge corpus (Gerstenberg 2015), we did not detect an age-related increase in euh usage. This is comparable to other work recording either no change (Keszler and Bóna 2019;Searl et al 2002) or even a decrease (Gall 2019;Gósy and Silber-Varod 2021;Maxim et al 1994;Taschenberger et al 2019) in the use of some FPs with age. Given that FPs have multiple discourse functions, and behave differently within speakers (Bortfeld et al 2001;Horton et al 2010), we suggest that it is inappropriate to make blanket predictions about how discourse particles, as a group, may change as a function of age.…”

“…In a seven-year comparison of LangAge speakers (the same corpus used here) the normalized frequency of euh significantly decreased with age (Gerstenberg 2015) while individual variations were also found. Taschenberger et al (2019) studied the filler in different age populations interacting with an interlocutor and with no background noise, non-speech background noise or background speech. While on average no changes in the frequency of fillers were found, under noisy conditions, fewer filler particles were produced in older age.…”

Speech aging: Production and perception

“…Young adults also produced filled pauses more frequently than both children and older adults. A study by Taschenberger et al (2019) also found that filled pauses declined with age, although only in more adverse speaking conditions. One study found that the rate of disfluencies in general appear to be similar between younger and older adults, increasing with speech task difficulty (e.g., interview vs sentence repetitions, Bóna, 2011).…”