Impact of age in the production of European Portuguese vowels

Abstract

The elderly population is quickly increasing in the developed countries. However, in European Portuguese (EP) no studies have examined the impact of age-related structural changes in speech acoustics. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of age ([60-70], [71-80] and [81-90]), gender and type of vowel in the acoustic characteristics (fundamental frequency (F0), first formant (F1), second formant (F2) and duration) of the EP vowels. A sample of 78 speakers was selected from the database of elderly speech collected by Microsoft Language Development Center (MLDC) within the Living Usability Lab (LUL) project. It was observed that duration is the only parameter that significantly changes with ageing, being the highest value found in the [81-90] group. Moreover, F0 decreases in females and increases in males with ageing. In general, F1 and F2 decreases with ageing, mainly in females. Comparing the data obtained with the results of previous studies with adult speakers, a trend towards the centralization of vowels with ageing is observed. This investigation is the starting point for a broader study which will allow to analyse the changes in vowels acoustics from childhood to old age in EP.

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

“…The increase of the TH is in accordance with our previous acoustic study [16] of aging speech for EP. In other words, the tongue raising (higher TH) is correlated with a decrease in F1 [9,56], which has been reported for both EP [15,16] and other languages [4,5,44,77,78] with aging. However, Pellegrini et al [17] reported higher F1 values for vowels produced by older EP females.…”

“…As for age-related changes on vowel formant frequencies (mostly F1 and F2), the results across studies are highly inconsistent [4,5,11,14]. In addition, European Portuguese (EP) vowels presented a different pattern of formant frequencies variation with age and gender [15][16][17]. Albuquerque et al [16,18] observed that vowel formants tend to decrease mainly in females and to centralize in males with aging, and these changes might be related to specific articulatory adjustments of the older speakers during speech.…”

“…Targeting the main limitations of our previous study, the main purpose of this work is to perform a larger study of the age-related articulatory differences in EP vowels with US imaging and to investigate normalization procedures. Additionally, since there is a paucity of literature on EP oral vowels production, and the available data were collected mainly for acoustic studies [15,16,24,25] or for articulatory studies of nasal vowels [26][27][28], this study also provides valuable insights for the accurate articulatory description of EP oral vowels with US.…”

Age and gender effects in European Portuguese spontaneous speech

“…Concerning European Portuguese (EP), there are only a few studies regarding age-related speech variations, mainly, at the segmental level (Albuquerque, Oliveira, Teixeira, Sa-Couto, & Figueiredo, 2019;Albuquerque et al, 2014;Guimarães & Abberton, 2005;Pellegrini et al, 2013). Still, vowel production in reading tasks failed to provide a clear picture of the age effects in spontaneous speech and has some limitations.…”

“…Since there is a paucity of literature on EP speech acoustics and the available data were collected from a small number of speakers (Albuquerque et al, 2014;Escudero, Boersma, Rauber, & Bion, 2009;Martins, 1973;Oliveira, Cunha, Silva, Teixeira, & Sa-Couto, 2012), this study also provides valuable insights to understand the aging effects on natural spoken language production. Knowledge of how speech changes with age is essential for the development of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems suitable for older voices (i.e., personalized reading aids and voice prostheses) (Vipperla, Renals, & Frankel, 2010), for clinical assessment and treatment of different speech disorders that are often age-related, and to provide information for other fields of knowledge (i.e., phonetics, speech science, forensic linguistics and biometric recognition).…”