Voice onset time and speakers’ age: Data from Hungarian

Abstract

The aim of this paper was to investigate the VOT of voiceless plosives (/p, t, k/) in the speech of Hungarian-speaking elderly. Read speech of 25 old (70 to 90 years) and 25 young (21 to 32 years) was analyzed. In each recording, the VOT of phonologically short [p, t, k] was measured. Our data show that VOT values of all three types of voiceless plosives would exhibit significant differences both in old and in young Hungarians' speech. Bilabial and alveolar plosives had significantly longer VOT in old subjects' speech than in that of young subjects, while old subjects produced significantly shorter VOTs in pronouncing [k] than their younger peers. We argue that these results are attributable to (1) significantly slower rate of articulation (yielding longer speech sounds in general), and (2) the articulatory and aerodynamic background of the production of plosives.

Effect of Age and Gender on Articulation of Voiced and Voiceless Stop Consonants in Czech

“…the same VOT category as was presented by Czech speakers. In general, our findings are quite well in agreement with these studies [17,18] as a group of Hungarian speakers composed predominantly of women demonstrated significantly shorter VOT of /p/ and /t/ in older (mean age 76.9 years) compared to younger group (mean age 25.3 years) [18] and a group of 130 male and 135 female Dutch-speaking participants demonstrated no significant change in duration of VOT of /p/ and /k/ [17].…”

“…Interestingly, the shortening of consonant duration in women was preserved even when using VOT ratio thus cannot be interpreted as a simple effect of faster speaking rate. Our results can be compared to two previous studies investigating voiceless plosives in Dutch [17] and Hungarian [18] speaking subjects as they reported their speakers to produce short voicing lag, i.e. the same VOT category as was presented by Czech speakers.…”

“…In previous literature [11][12][13][15][16][17][18][19], there are conflicting reports on the effects of age and gender on acoustic characteristics of consonants such as VOT. Furthermore, little is known about acoustic characteristics of stop consonants in Czech.…”

“…In particular, VOT decreases as the speaking rate increases and vice versa, indicating that the overall rate changes are implemented at the segmental level [9,14]. With respect to age and gender differences in VOT production, the findings in previous literature are rather inconsistent [11][12][13][15][16][17][18][19]. While some researchers reported no differences in VOT duration between younger and older speakers [11,15] as well as between performances of men and women [12,16] others found both longer [17,18] or shorter [13] duration of VOT in older speakers as well as genderdependence of VOT [13,19].…”

Effect of Age on the Voice Onset Time of Korean Stops in VCV contexts

“…폐쇄음은 입술, 혀, 턱, 후두 사이의 세밀한 협응을 통해서 산출되기 때문에, 음성 제어 능 력을 폐쇄음으로 VOT를 측정할 수 있다고 알려져 있다 (Auzou et al, 2000). Koenig(2000) 폐쇄음의 조음위치는 VOT값에 영향을 미치는 것으로 보고 되며, 선행 연구 (Bona & Auszmann, 2014;Cho et al, 2002;Lundeborg et al, 2012;Han, 2013 (Broersma, 2010;Rami et al, 1999;Shin, 2010). Rami 외 (Kent, 1976;Kummer, 2014).…”