Vowel space area in later childhood and adolescence: Effects of age, sex and ease of communication

Acoustics of Clear and Noise-Adapted Speech in Children, Young, and Older Adults

“…Rather, it suggests that children do not have fully adultlike CS strategies and, furthermore, that speaking in noise seems to induce a more automatic repertoire of responses resulting from increased vocal effort. Similar to Pettinato et al (2016), children in the current study had a slightly larger overall VSA than young adults in their baseline CO speech (271414 Hz 2 vs. 231831 Hz 2 ), which could indicate, as Pettinato and colleagues argue, that children also need to learn how to produce hypo-articulated variants when appropriate. Older adults made smaller VSA increases in both noise (26453 Hz 2 ) and CS (30583 Hz 2 ) compared with young adults, albeit these differences were not statistically significant.…”

“…Children increased the VSA less in CS (clear minus conversational) compared with the young adults (42678 Hz 2 vs. 96363 Hz 2 ), although the difference was not significant. The smaller adjustment in VSA found in CS mirrors differences in VSA expansion found in Pettinato and Hazan (2013) and Pettinato et al (2016) for children 9-14 years old and young adults in response to vocoded speech. The fact that children could increase VSA in noise suggests that the somewhat smaller VSA expansion in CS is not the result of the children's inability to produce hyper-articulated vowels.…”

“…Syrett and Kawahara (2013) showed that 3-to 5-year-old children produced conversational-to-clear speech modifications typically found for adults (e.g., expanded F0 range; longer, louder, and more dispersed vowels). In contrast, Pettinato and Hazan (2013); Pettinato, Tuominen, Granlund, and Hazan (2016); and Hazan et al (2016) found that differences between children's and adult's CS productions (e.g., vowel hyper-articulation) persisted even for 9-10 and 13-14 years old. These findings suggest that many features of adultlike speaking style adaptations continue to develop into adolescence.…”

Intelligibility of Noise-Adapted and Clear Speech in Child, Young Adult, and Older Adult Talkers

“…Children as young as 3-5 years old produced perceptibly different speaking styles, demonstrating that even very young children have some ability to modify their speech when instructed to produce listener-oriented speech (Redford & Gildersleeve-Neumann, 2009;Syrett & Kawahara, 2014). However, acoustic analyses revealed that even by ages 9-10 and 13-14, children differed in precise CS modifications (e.g., vowel hyperarticulation) compared to adults (Pettinato & Hazan, 2013;Pettinato, Tuomainen, Granlund, & Hazan, 2016). This suggests that many features of adultlike speaking style adaptations continue to develop into adolescence.…”

Vowel production of Mandarin-speaking hearing aid users with different types of hearing loss

“…However, VSA has been shown to negatively correlate with chronological age; namely, older speakers display smaller VSA [71,79,80]. Therefore, the VSA reduction found in the COND group was not a result of factors related to chronological age.…”