Twenty-eight years of vowels: Tracking phonetic variation through young to middle age adulthood

Gahl, Susanne; Baayen, R. Harald

doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2019.02.001

Cited by 28 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 90 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Although our illustration may suggest a unidirectional information cascade from the environment to retrieval, our framework does not preclude a dynamic flow, with later components influencing earlier ones. For example, pronunciation tends to change with age, likely as a result of continued experience and efforts to optimize discrimination between words [27,28], and these perceptual/motor changes can be seen as influences on the linguistic environment of those exposed to the language of older speakers. In what follows, we review past evidence concerning each of these components below.…”

Section: A Framework For Understanding the Aging Lexiconmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Perspectives on the Aging Lexicon

Wulff

Deyne

Jones

et al. 2019

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

117

126

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The field of cognitive aging has seen considerable advances in describing the linguistic and semantic changes that happen during the adult life span to uncover the structure of the mental lexicon (i.e., the mental repository of lexical and conceptual representations). Nevertheless, there is still debate concerning the sources of these changes, including the role of environmental exposure and several cognitive mechanisms associated with learning, representation, and retrieval of information. We review the current status of research in this field and outline a framework that promises to assess the contribution of both ecological and psychological aspects to the aging lexicon. Cognitive Aging and the Mental Lexicon There is consensus in the cognitive sciences that human development extends well beyond childhood and adolescence, and there has been remarkable empirical progress in the field of cognitive aging in past decades [1]. Nevertheless, the role of environmental and cognitive factors in age-related changes in the structure and processing of lexical and semantic representations (see Glossary) is still under debate. For example, age-related memory decline is commonly attributed to a decline in cognitive abilities [2,3], yet some researchers have proposed that massive exposure to language over the course of one's life leads to knowledge gains that may contribute to, if not fully account for, age-related memory deficits [4-6]. We argue that to resolve such debates we require an interdisciplinary approach that captures how information exposure across adulthood may change the way that we acquire, represent, and recall information. We summarize recent developments in the field (Figure 1, Table 1) and propose a conceptual framework (Figure 2, Key Figure) and associated research agenda that argues for combining ecological analyses, formal modeling, and large-scale empirical studies to shed light on the contents, structure, and neural basis of the aging mental lexicon in both health and disease. Mental Lexicon: Aging and Cognitive Performance The mental lexicon can be thought of as a repository of lexical and conceptual representations, composed of organized networks of semantic, phonological, orthographic, morphological, and other types of information [7]. The cognitive sciences have provided considerable knowledge about the computational (Box 1; [8-11]) and neural basis (Box 2; [12,13]) of lexical and semantic cognition, and there has been considerable interest in how such aspects of cognition change across adulthood and aging [14,15]. Past work on the aging lexicon emphasized the amount of information acquired across the life span (e.g., vocabulary gains across adulthood; [15]); however, new evaluations using graphbased approaches suggest that both quantity and structural aspects of representations differ between individuals [16] and change across the life span [17-19]. Such insights were gathered, for example, from a large-scale analysis of free association data from thousands of individuals [17], ranging from 10 to ...

show abstract

Section: A Framework For Understanding the Aging Lexiconmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Perspectives on the Aging Lexicon

Wulff

Deyne

Jones

et al. 2019

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

117

126

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Summary figure illustrating the age ranges from a range of speech production studies. Design inspired from Gahl and Baayen (2019)…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speech aging: Production and perception

Tucker

Ford

Hedges

2021

WIRES Cognitive Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this overview we describe literature on how speech production and speech perception change in healthy or normal aging across the adult lifespan. In the production section we review acoustic characteristics that have been investigated as potentially distinguishing younger and older adults. In the speech perception section studies concerning speaker age estimation and those investigating older listeners' perception are addressed. Our discussion focuses on major themes and other fruitful areas for future research. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language in Mind and Brain Linguistics > Linguistic Theory Psychology > Development and Aging

show abstract

“…Our study therefore shows that speakers acquired greater articulatory practice and this practice becomes part of their mental lexicon. Just recently, investigating speech production of the same speakers over a periode of 28 years, Gahl and Baayen (2019) have shown that the positions of vowels in the F1/F2 space shift towards the periphery, the older the speakers are, making them more discriminable. Thus, the changes attested in the present study do not only mirror improved kinematic skills but also greater lexical proficiency.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How is anticipatory coarticulation of suffixes affected by lexical proficiency?

Tomaschek¹,

Bv²,

Ramscar³

et al. 2019

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

More and more studies find differences in fine phonetic detail related to the morphological function of words and segments. In the present study, we investigated to what extent these differences arise due to anticipatory coarticulation of inflectional exponents and the amount of long-term practice with individual verbs such as American English "clean", "cleaned", "cleans", "cleaning". Kinematic studies of hand movements show that with greater practice, i.e. regular repetition of a sequence of gestures, upcoming gestures are stronger and smoother anticipated. Consequently, we hypothesized to find stronger anticipatory coarticulation of inflectional exponents during the articulation of the stem vowel in verbs for which speakers acquired a greater lexical proficiency, as their articulatory gestures were better practiced. We observed both, stronger anticipatory coarticulation towards the offset of the gesture and less coarticulation concomittant with more hyperarticulation towards the onset of the gesture. We link these results to findings that morphological function is reflected in fine phonetic detail, challenging traditional models of speech production, which assume a separation of lexical information and the phonetic detail.

show abstract

Twenty-eight years of vowels: Tracking phonetic variation through young to middle age adulthood

Cited by 28 publications

References 90 publications

New Perspectives on the Aging Lexicon

New Perspectives on the Aging Lexicon

Speech aging: Production and perception

How is anticipatory coarticulation of suffixes affected by lexical proficiency?

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About