Change of static characteristics of Japanese word utterances with aging
Mitsunori Mizumachi, Ogata Kazuto · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2014
Acoustical characteristics of elderly speech have been investigated in the various viewpoints. Elderly speech can be subjectively characterized by roughness, breathiness, asthenic, and hoarseness. Those characteristics have been individually explained in both medical science and speech science. In particular, the hoarseness, which is caused by a physiological problem with an aged vocal cord, is the most well-known static properties of elderly speech. Change of the hoarseness is quantitatively investigated with aging. Japanese phonetically-balanced 543 word utterances were collected with the cooperation of 153 speakers, whose ages ranged from 20 to 89 years old. Acoustical characteristics of the word utterances were examined in the viewpoints of age and auditory impression. In the static acoustical analysis of Japanese vowels /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/, it is confirmed that energy in the high frequency region rises with aging. There is a remarkable energy lift over 4 kHz, and the amount of the energy lift is proportion to the degree of subjective hoarseness.