The age effects on EP vowel production: an ultrasound pilot study

Albuquerque, Luciana; Valente, Ana Rita; Barros, Fábio; Teixeira, António; Silva, Samuel; Martins, Paula; Oliveira, Catarina

doi:10.21437/iberspeech.2021-52

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Albuquerque et al (2019Albuquerque et al ( , 2020 and Oliveira et al (2021) report changes towards vowel centralization for older male speakers and a lowering of F1 and F2 for older female speakers in a large database of European Portuguese speakers. In their preliminary ultrasound study, Albuquerque et al (2021) suggest that this decrease in F1-F2 frequencies relate to a smaller articulatory space, as demonstrated by the older female speakers. Sex-dependent changes are also reported in Rastatter et al (1997), who observe more changes in male than in female speakers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Multi-Dimensional Variation in Adult Speech as a Function of Age

2021

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We present a multidimensional acoustic report describing variation in speech productions on data collected from 500 francophone adult speakers (20 to 93 y.o.a.) as a function of age. In this cross-sectional study, chronological age is considered as a continuous variable while oral productions, in reading and speech-like tasks, are characterized via 22 descriptors related to voice quality, pitch, vowel articulation and vocalic system organization, time-related measures and temporal organization, as well as maximal performances in speech-like tasks. In a first analysis, we detail how each descriptor varies according to the age of the speaker, for male and female speakers separately. In a second analysis, we explore how chronological age is, in turn, predicted by the combination of all descriptors. Overall, results confirm that with increasing age, speakers show more voice instability, sex-dependent pitch changes, slower speech and articulation rates, slower repetition rates and less complexity effects in maximal performance tasks. A notable finding of this study is that some of these changes are continuous throughout adulthood while other appear either at old age or in early adulthood. Chronological age appears only moderately indexed in speech, mainly through speech rate parameters. We discuss these results in relation with the notion of attrition and with other possible factors at play, in an attempt to better capture the multidimensional nature of the notion of “age”.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Multi-Dimensional Variation in Adult Speech as a Function of Age

2021

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“…Regarding the vowel context, as in the pilot study [22], the articulatory space tends to be smaller when vowels occur in pVCv sequences comparing with isolated vowels, mainly for younger females. The vowel articulatory space reduction observed for vowels in pVCv sequences in comparison with isolated vowels might be related with the tendency to hyperarticulate isolated vowels.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 65%

“…With US, Sonies et al [23] studied the tongue movements in healthy older and younger English speakers, during the repetition of the phonemes [a], [i], and [k], and they observed a reduction in tongue retraction during the vowel [a] production for older speakers. A pilot study for EP with US [22] suggested that the vowel articulatory space tends to be smaller in the older EP females comparing with younger females.…”

Section: Articulatory Studies Of Age Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Unlike acoustic studies, for articulatory studies, there are only a few that examine the effects of aging on tongue position and strength during speech production [1,[19][20][21][22]. Ultrasound (US) tongue imaging synchronized with audio can be used to investigate the physiological differences between old and young adult speech [19,23], as approached in our previous work with four female speakers [22]. Nonetheless, US tongue image processing and the inter-speaker comparison are challenging [22].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ultrasound (US) tongue imaging synchronized with audio can be used to investigate the physiological differences between old and young adult speech [19,23], as approached in our previous work with four female speakers [22]. Nonetheless, US tongue image processing and the inter-speaker comparison are challenging [22]. 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.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

et al. 2022

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For aging speech, there is limited knowledge regarding the articulatory adjustments underlying the acoustic findings observed in previous studies. In order to investigate the age-related articulatory differences in European Portuguese (EP) vowels, the present study analyzes the tongue configuration of the nine EP oral vowels (isolated context and pseudoword context) produced by 10 female speakers of two different age groups (young and old). From the tongue contours automatically segmented from the US images and manually revised, the parameters (tongue height and tongue advancement) were extracted. The results suggest that the tongue tends to be higher and more advanced for the older females compared to the younger ones for almost all vowels. Thus, the vowel articulatory space tends to be higher, advanced, and bigger with age. For older females, unlike younger females that presented a sharp reduction in the articulatory vowel space in disyllabic sequences, the vowel space tends to be more advanced for isolated vowels compared with vowels produced in disyllabic sequences. This study extends our pilot research by reporting articulatory data from more speakers based on an improved automatic method of tongue contours tracing, and it performs an inter-speaker comparison through the application of a novel normalization procedure.

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Human-inspired computational models for European Portuguese: a review

Teixeira

Silva

2023

Lang Resources & Evaluation

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This paper surveys human-inspired speech technologies developed for European Portuguese and the computational models they integrate and made them possible. In this regard, it covers systems for synthesis and recognition as well as information on the methods adopted for the speech production studies that were performed, in parallel, to support them. And, on doing so, it can also contribute to provide an entry point for those who work in the field but are not familiar with these particular areas, including: context, history, and comprehensive references. As the great majority of work in these areas for European Portuguese was done by the first author’s research group, this paper can also be seen as a review of more than 25 years of research at University of Aveiro in these topics.

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The age effects on EP vowel production: an ultrasound pilot study

Cited by 5 publications

References 17 publications

Multi-Dimensional Variation in Adult Speech as a Function of Age

Multi-Dimensional Variation in Adult Speech as a Function of Age

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

Human-inspired computational models for European Portuguese: a review

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