A Study of Acoustic Correlates of Speaker Age

Abstract

Abstract. Speaker age is a speaker characteristic which is always present in speech. Previous studies have found numerous acoustic features which correlate with speaker age. However, few attempts have been made to establish their relative importance. This study automatically extracted 161 acoustic features from six words produced by 527 speakers of both genders, and used normalised means to directly compare the features. Segment duration and sound pressure level (SPL) range were identified as the most important acoustic correlates of speaker age.

Acoustic Analysis of Adult Speaker Age

“…F 0 then remains stable into old age, but may also rise or lower slightly [45,46,27,47,4,43]. Observations of decreasing F 0 from age 20 to 50 in females have also reported [15,36]. A lower F 0 is also associated with older female PA [2,28].…”

“…These features have often been analysed in acoustic studies of age using a number of measures with varying results. Although sometimes no correlation with age has been found for jitter [51,32,54,55,15,36], other researchers have reported increased jitter levels for older female and male CA (but not PA) [49,53,26,43,22]. However, higher and more variable jitter values seem to be more related to physiological health than to age [3,53,2,28].…”

“…The habitual SPL range in vowels is likely to increase with advancing female and male CA, and may be an important correlate of speaker age [43,15,36]. However, the maximum vowel SPL range seems to decrease in both women and men, while minimum SPL levels increase for women (to the author's knowledge, no studies have been made concerning men) with advancing CA [31,2].…”

“…A lower F 0 is also associated with older female PA [2,28]. In males, F 0 lowers slightly (by about 10 Hz) from young adulthood to middle CA, but then rises considerably (about 35 Hz) with old CA [48,46,2,15,36]. Higher F 0 has been reported to be a cue to old male PA [33,2].…”

“…However, stable (females) or decreasing shimmer levels after age 40 (males) have also been observed [15,36]. Other studies have found shimmer to correlate strongly with CA and PA only in spontaneous speech samples (but not in read speech or in prolonged vowels) [28].…”