Envelhecimento vocal: estudo acústico-articulatório das alterações de fala com a idade

Background: Although the aging process causes specific alterations in the speech organs, the knowledge about the age effects in speech production is still disperse and incomplete. Objective: To provide a broader view of the age-related segmental and suprasegmental speech changes in European Portuguese (EP), considering new aspects besides static acoustic features, such as dynamic and articulatory data. Method: Two databases, with speech data of Portuguese adult native speakers obtained through standardized recording and segmentation procedures, were devised: i) an acoustic database containing all EP oral vowels produced in similar context (reading speech), and also a sample of semispontaneous speech (image description) collected from a large sample of adults between the ages 35 and 97; ii) and another with articulatory data (ultrasound (US) tongue images synchronized with speech) for all EP oral vowels produced in similar contexts (pseudowords and isolated) collected from young ([21-35]) and older ([55-73]) adults. Results: Based on the curated databases, various aspects of the aging speech were analyzed. Acoustically, the aging speech is characterized by: 1) longer vowels (in both genders); 2) a tendency for F0 to decrease in women and slightly increase in men; 3) lower vowel formant frequencies in females; 4) a significant reduction of the vowel acoustic space in men; 5) vowels with higher trajectory slope of F1 (in both genders); 6) shorter descriptions with higher pause time for males; 7) faster speech and articulation rate for females; and 8) lower HNR for females in semi-spontaneous speech. In addition, the total speech duration decrease is associated to non-severe depression symptoms and age. Older adults tended to present more depressive symptoms that could impact the amount of speech produced. Concerning the articulatory data, the tongue tends to be higher and more advanced with aging for almost all vowels, meaning that the vowel articulatory space tends to be higher, advanced, and bigger in older females. Conclusion: This study provides new information on aging speech for a language other than English. These results corroborate that speech changes with age and present different patterns between genders, and also suggest that speakers might develop specific articulatory adjustments with aging.Contextualização: Embora o processo de envelhecimento cause alterações específicas no sistema de produção de fala, o conhecimento sobre os efeitos da idade na fala é ainda disperso e incompleto. Objetivo: Proporcionar uma visão mais ampla das alterações segmentais e suprassegmentais da fala relacionadas com a idade no Português Europeu (PE), considerando outros aspetos, para além das características acústicas estáticas, tais como dados dinâmicos e articulatórios. Método: Foram criadas duas bases de dados, com dados de fala de adultos nativos do PE, obtidos através de procedimentos padronizados de gravação e segmentação: i) uma base de dados acústica contendo todas as vogais orais do PE em contexto semelhante (leitura de palavras), e também uma amostra de fala semiespontânea (descrição de imagem) produzidas por uma larga amostra de indivíduos entre os 35 e os 97 anos; ii) e outra com dados articulatórios (imagens de ultrassom da língua sincronizadas com o sinal acústico) de todas as vogais orais do PE produzidas em contextos semelhantes (pseudopalavras e palavras isoladas) por adultos de duas faixas etárias ([21-35] e [55-73]). Resultados: Tendo em conta as bases de dados curadas, foi analisado o efeito da idade em diversas características da fala. Acusticamente, a fala de pessoas mais velhas é caracterizada por: 1) vogais mais longas (ambos os sexos); 2) tendência para F0 diminuir nas mulheres e aumentar ligeiramente nos homens; 3) diminuição da frequência dos formantes das vogais nas mulheres; 4) redução significativa do espaço acústico das vogais nos homens; 5) vogais com maior inclinação da trajetória de F1 (ambos os sexos); 6) descrições mais curtas e com maior tempo de pausa nos homens; 7) aumento da velocidade articulatória e da velocidade de fala nas mulheres; e 8) diminuição do HNR na fala semiespontânea em mulheres. Além disso, os idosos tendem a apresentar mais sintomas depressivos que podem afetar a quantidade de fala produzida. Em relação aos dados articulatórios, a língua tende a apresentar-se mais alta e avançada em quase todas as vogais com a idade, ou seja o espaço articulatório das vogais tende a ser maior, mais alto e avançado nas mulheres mais velhas. Conclusão: Este estudo fornece novos dados sobre o efeito da idade na fala para uma língua diferente do inglês. Os resultados corroboram que a fala sofre alterações com a idade, que diferem em função do género, sugerindo ainda que os falantes podem desenvolver ajustes articulatórios específicos com a idade.Programa Doutoral em Gerontologia e Geriatri

Correlating ASR Errors with Developmental Changes in Speech Production: A Study of 3-10-Year-Old European Portuguese Children's Speech

International audienceAutomatically recognising children's speech is a very difficult task. This difficulty can be attributed to the high variability in children's speech, both within and across speakers. The variability is due to developmental changes in children's anatomy, speech production skills et cetera, and manifests itself, for example, in fundamental and formant frequencies, the frequency of disfluencies, and pronunciation quality. In this paper, we report the results of acoustic and auditory analyses of 3-10-year-old European Portuguese children's speech. Furthermore, we are able to correlate some of the pronunciation error patterns revealed by our analyses - such as the truncation of consonant clusters - with the errors made by a children's speech recogniser trained on speech collected from the same age group. Other pronunciation error patterns seem to have little or no impact on speech recognition performance. In future work, we will attempt to use our findings to improve the performance of our recogniser

Automatically Recognising European Portuguese Children's Speech

International audienceThis paper reports findings from an analysis of errors made by an automatic speech recogniser trained and tested with 3-10-year-old European Portuguese children's speech. We expected and were able to identify frequent pronunciation error patterns in the children's speech. Furthermore, we were able to correlate some of these pronunciation error patterns and automatic speech recognition errors. The findings reported in this paper are of phonetic interest but will also be useful for improving the performance of automatic speech recognisers aimed at children representing the target population of the study

Association between acoustic speech features and non-severe levels of anxiety and depression symptoms across lifespan

Background Several studies have investigated the acoustic effects of diagnosed anxiety and depression. Anxiety and depression are not characteristics of the typical aging process, but minimal or mild symptoms can appear and evolve with age. However, the knowledge about the association between speech and anxiety or depression is scarce for minimal/mild symptoms, typical of healthy aging. As longevity and aging are still a new phenomenon worldwide, posing also several clinical challenges, it is important to improve our understanding of non-severe mood symptoms’ impact on acoustic features across lifetime. The purpose of this study was to determine if variations in acoustic measures of voice are associated with non-severe anxiety or depression symptoms in adult population across lifetime. Methods Two different speech tasks (reading vowels in disyllabic words and describing a picture) were produced by 112 individuals aged 35-97. To assess anxiety and depression symptoms, the Hospital Anxiety Depression Scale (HADS) was used. The association between the segmental and suprasegmental acoustic parameters and HADS scores were analyzed using the linear multiple regression technique. Results The number of participants with presence of anxiety or depression symptoms is low (>7: 26.8% and 10.7%, respectively) and non-severe (HADS-A: 5.4 ± 2.9 and HADS-D: 4.2 ± 2.7, respectively). Adults with higher anxiety symptoms did not present significant relationships associated with the acoustic parameters studied. Adults with increased depressive symptoms presented higher vowel duration, longer total pause duration and short total speech duration. Finally, age presented a positive and significant effect only for depressive symptoms, showing that older participants tend to have more depressive symptoms. Conclusions Non-severe depression symptoms can be related to some acoustic parameters and age. Depression symptoms can be explained by acoustic parameters even among individuals without severe symptom levels.publishe

Phonological influence in bilectal speakers of Brazilian and European Portuguese

Aims and objectives: This article investigates naturalistic acquisition of a second dialect (D2), comparing the global accent of speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) exposed to European Portuguese (EP), either as children or as adults (early vs late bilectals). The focus is on the predicted advantage of an early age of onset of the D2, as well as possible crosslinguistic influence from the D2 onto the first dialect (D1). Design and methodology: The study is an Accent Rating Task, where 50 raters judged the global accent of 30 BP speakers living in Portugal (15 early + 15 late bilectals), who were recorded in both BP and EP modes. Using a 6-point Likert-type scale, the raters judged whether the speakers sounded Brazilian or Portuguese and also indicated how certain they were about their judgment. Data and analysis: The data consisted of two 10-second audio snippets from each speaker, one in BP and the other in EP mode (altogether 60 items). In addition, there were 10 control items produced by native BP and EP speakers. Several mixed-effects models compared the target groups to each other and to the monolectal controls. Findings and conclusions: Both the early and late bilectals were rated as Brazilian in BP mode, but the degree of rater certainty was significantly lower for early than for late bilectals, which was again lower than for BP monolectals. In EP mode, early bilectals were perceived as Portuguese (though the raters were less certain than when rating EP monolectals), while late bilectals were judged as Brazilian

Efectos de la edad y del sexo en el habla espontánea en portugués europeo

Aging is part of the normal evolution of human beings. However, the knowledge about speech in the older ages is still dispersed and incomplete. Considering conflicting findings reported in prior research, this study aims to contribute to increase our knowledge about age effects on the spontaneous speech of Portuguese adults. In order to analyze the effects of age on rhythmic, intonation and voice quality domains, several parameters were extracted from spontaneous speech produced by 112 adults, aged between 35 and 97. Data were obtained through a picture description task. The results showed that the most consistent age-related effects are an increase in speech pauses, mainly in men, and a Harmonics-to-Noise Ratio (HNR) decrease in women. Speaking fundamental frequency (f0) tends to decrease in women and to slightly increase in men with age. These findings for Portuguese are in line with previous research suggesting that suprasegmental characteristics of speech change with age, with some gender differences.El envejecimiento es parte de la evolución normal del ser humano. Sin embargo, el conocimiento sobre el habla en las edades más avanzadas todavía es disperso e incompleto. Teniendo en cuenta los hallazgos contradictorios referidos en investigaciones anteriores, este estudio tiene como objetivo contribuir a aumentar el conocimiento sobre los efectos de la edad en el habla espontánea de los adultos portugueses. Para analizar los efectos de la edad en los dominios del ritmo, entonación y calidad vocal, se extrajeron varios parámetros del habla espontánea producida por 112 adultos, con edades entre 35 y 97 años. Los datos se obtuvieron mediante una tarea de descripción de imágenes. Los resultados demostraron que los efectos relacionados con la edad más constantes fueron un aumento en las pausas del habla, principalmente en los hombres, y una disminución del ratio armónico-ruido en las mujeres. La frecuencia fundamental del habla (f0) tiende a disminuir en las mujeres y a aumentar ligeramente en los hombres con la edad. Estos hallazgos para el portugués están de acuerdo con investigaciones previas que sugieren que las características suprasegmentales del habla cambian con la edad, con algunas diferencias de género. &nbsp

Validity and reliability of the 2nd European Portuguese version of the “Consensus Auditory-Perceptual Evaluation of Voice” (II EP CAPE-V)

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master in Science at the Health Science School of Polytechnic Institute of SetúbalIntroduction: Auditory-perceptual evaluation of voice is a part of a multidimensional voice evaluation, and is claimed to be “golden standard”. The “Consensus Auditory-Perceptual Evaluation of Voice” (CAPE-V) has been demonstrated to be a valid and reliable instrument for voice evaluation, when applied in both clinical and scientific research fields. The CAPE-V was first translated into European Portuguese (EP) (Jesus et al., 2009) however it revealed some validity and reliability problems. The purpose of this study was to assure a valid and reliable EP version of CAPE-V. This resulted in the 2nd EP version of CAPE-V (II EP CAPE-V), with permission granted by ASHA. Method: This was a transversal, observational, descriptive, and comparative study. 14 Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) voice experts (>5 years of clinical practice), rated a total of 26 voice samples produced by 10 males (mean age=45) and 10 females (mean age=43) classified into two groups: a control group (n=10) and a dysphonic group (n=10), with subjects matched for age and gender. All voice samples were rated in one session with the II EP CAPE-V, and in a second session one week later with GRBAS. Content validity was supported by 6 new sentences conceptualized and adapted to EP linguistic and cultural context according to the rationale outlined in the original CAPE-V protocol. For construct validity analysis, an independent samples t-test (α=.05) was performed for all vocal parameter. Concurrent validity was estimated with the multi-serial correlation coefficient between II EP CAPE-V and GRBAS parameters (r>.70). Reliability was performed for all vocal parameters. Inter-rater reliability was determined by ICC, and intra-rater reliability by Pearson’s correlation coefficient (r>.70). Results/conclusion: Content validity was assured by an EP linguistic expert, who reviewed the six new sentences. Construct validity was obtained for all voical parameters (p.89) for overall severity/grade, roughness, and breathiness parameters. High inter-rater reliability (ICC>.84) was obtained for all parameters. Intra-rater reliability was high (r>.87) for overall severity, breathiness, and pitch; good (r=.73) for strain; and moderate (r>.69) for roughness and loudness parameters. The II EP CAPE-V is a valid and reliable instrument for auditory-perceptual evaluation, with all psychometric characteristics established

Phonological variation and prosodic representation : clitics in Portuguese-Veneto contact

In a variety of Brazilian Portuguese in contact with Veneto, variable vowel reduction in clitic position can be partially accounted for by the phonotactic profile of clitic structures. We show that, when phonotactic profile is controlled for, vowel reduction is statistically more frequent in non-pronominal than in pronominal clitics, which indicates that these clitic types are represented in separate prosodic domains. We propose that this difference in frequency of reduction between clitic types is only possible due to contact with Veneto, which, unlike standard BP, does not exhibit vowel reduction in clitic position. Contact thus provides speakers with the possibility of producing clitic vowels without reduction, and the resulting variation is used to signal prosodic distinctions between clitic types. We show that the difference in frequency of reduction is larger for older speakers, who are more proficient in Veneto and use the language regularly

Cape Verdean Creole – Santo Antão: what we know so far

The Santo Antão variety (SA) of Cape Verdean Creole (CVC) is not only very little studied but the existing publications, overwhelmingly in Portuguese, are not well known among a wider linguistic audience. This is particularly surprising if we consider that from the first Cape Verdean census, in 1731 (Carreira 1984), until the 1970s Santo Antão has been the second most populous island of the archipelago. The article presents a review of the literature from historical sources aboutthe settlement of Santo Antão, which then serves as a base from which to reconsider current debates about the genesis of CVC. Linguistic data, mainly of phonological nature, from conversations recorded during a short field trip to Santo Antão (Cabo da Ribeira and Vila das Pombas), complemented by existing data on other varieties of CVC, are used to support the proposed hypotheses

A synchronic analysis of Indian English

The present paper aims at exploring the impact that linguistic background can have on individual speech. After a brief review on how English became an official language in the republic of India, I will concentrate on the phonological aspect of Indian English. I will, firstly, procure a framework that ensures a baseline for a standard form of Indian English. Secondly, I will analyse an authentic speech sample and will discuss a number of factors that account for the adherence/deviation from the standard and which depict the phonological identity of this particular speaker