Age-related changes in acoustic characteristics of adult speech

Torre, Peter; Barlow, Jessica A.

doi:10.1016/j.jcomdis.2009.03.001

Cited by 173 publications

(146 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…On the other, we appear to be witnessing lengthening of VOT over time even in our oldest speakers (aged from 67 to 90), who would be expected to show the shortest VOTs (e.g., Benjamin 1982). Our results are more like those of Torre and Barlow (2009), which suggest that VOT in their speakers reflects local socially-determined categories of social age and gender, since in their study older men had the shortest VOT of all groups, but their older women had the same durations as younger women. Other phonetic features are known to be constrained by physiological factors, but can also be manipulated according to factors of social identity.…”

Section: Real-time Change In Vot In Scottish Englishsupporting

confidence: 58%

“…Research on VOT duration and aging does not present straightforward results. Some studies have found that older speakers (e.g., over 70) show shorter VOT durations than younger speakers (e.g., Benjamin 1982;Ryalls et al 2004), while other studies have either found no significant age-related difference in VOT (e.g., Neiman et al 1983;Petrosino et al 1993) or complex interactions between age and gender (Torre and Barlow 2009), suggesting that VOT values may reflect age as a socially-conditioned life stage as much as the results of aging physiology.…”

Section: Variation In Vot: Social and Speaker-specific Factorsmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…However, speech rate is unlikely to explain shorter VOTs in elderly speakers, who typically speak more slowly (e.g., Torre and Barlow 2009). More generally, individual differences in VOT remain even after speaking rate is controlled for (Allen et al 2003;Yu et al 2013).…”

Section: Variation In Vot: Social and Speaker-specific Factorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The private life of stops: VOT in a real-time corpus of spontaneous Glaswegian

Stuart‐Smith

Sonderegger

Rathcke

et al. 2015

Laboratory Phonology

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While voice onset time (VOT) is known to be sensitive to a range of phonetic and linguistic factors, much less is known about VOT in spontaneous speech, since most studies consider stops in single words, in sentences, and/or in read speech. Scottish English is typically said to show less aspirated voiceless stops than other varieties of English, but there is also variation, ranging from unaspirated stops in vernacular speakers to more aspirated stops in Scottish Standard English; change in the vernacular has also been suggested. This paper presents results from a study which used a fast, semi-automated procedure for analyzing positive VOT, and applied it to stressed syllable-initial stops from a real-and apparent-time corpus of naturally-occurring spontaneous Glaswegian vernacular speech. We confirm significant effects on VOT for place of articulation and local speaking rate, and trends for vowel height and lexical frequency. With respect to time, our results are not consistent with previous work reporting generally shorter VOT in elderly speakers, since our results from models which control for local speech rate show lengthening over real-time in the elderly speakers in our sample. Overall, our findings suggest that VOT in both voiceless and voiced stops is lengthening over the course of the twentieth century in this variety of Scottish English. They also support observations from other studies, both from Scotland and beyond, indicating that gradient shifts along the VOT continuum reflect subtle sociolinguistic control.

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Section: Real-time Change In Vot In Scottish Englishsupporting

confidence: 58%

Section: Variation In Vot: Social and Speaker-specific Factorsmentioning

confidence: 98%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The private life of stops: VOT in a real-time corpus of spontaneous Glaswegian

Stuart‐Smith

Sonderegger

Rathcke

et al. 2015

Laboratory Phonology

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“…The characteristic "older voice" is thought to result from a complex interaction of sensorimotor changes that accompany aging -for example, speech motor changes (Liss, Weismer, & Rosenbek, 1990;Ryan & Burk, 1974) and declines in auditory feedback (Liss, et al, 1990) -and cognitive-linguistic factors such as slowed cognitive processing. As with age-related changes to other systems, there is much individual variation with regards to the rate and extent of the effect (Mueller, 1997 Laures- Gore, 2006;Torre & Barlow, 2009), and the overall physical condition of the individual also plays a role in the speech changes observed (Ramig & Ringel, 1983).…”

Section: Accepted To Journal Of Speech Language and Hearing Research (mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Both the temporal and spectral features of the speech signal undergo change as people age (Torre & Barlow, 2009;Zraick, Gregg, & Whitehouse, 2006). If one considers these age-related…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effect of Speaker Age on Speech Recognition and Perceived Listening Effort in Older Adults With Hearing Loss

McAuliffe

Wilding

Rickard

et al. 2012

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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Purpose: Older adults exhibit difficulty understanding speech that has been experimentally degraded. Age-related changes to the speech mechanism lead to natural degradations in signal quality. We tested the hypothesis that older adults with hearing loss would exhibit declines in speech recognition when listening to the speech of older adults, compared with the speech of younger adults, and would report greater amounts of listening effort in this task.Methods: Nineteen individuals with age-related hearing loss completed speech recognition and listening effort scaling tasks. Both were conducted in quiet, when listening to high and low predictability phrases produced by younger and older speakers respectively.Results: No significant difference in speech recognition existed when stimuli were derived from younger or older speakers. However, perceived effort was significantly higher when listening to speech from older adults, as compared to younger adults. Conclusions:For older individuals with hearing loss, natural degradations in signal quality may require greater listening effort. However, they do not interfere with speech recognition -at least in quiet. Follow-up investigation of the effect of speaker age on speech recognition and listening effort under more challenging noise conditions appears warranted.

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