Acoustic correlates of aging
Lorraine A. Ramig, Ronald Callaway Scherer, Ingo R. Titze · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1984
Speaker age may be an important variable in the assessment of normal and pathological voices as well as in voice identification and recognition. It is therefore necessary to determine acoustic variables which predict not only chronological age of speakers but also listeners' perception of speaker age. Auditory and acoustic studies were carried out on vowel productions of 48 subjects, aged 25–75 years, and representing good and poor levels of physiological condition [L A. Ramig and R. L. Ringel, J. Speech Hear. Res. 26, 22–30 (1983)]. Results indicate that age could be predicted only in the poor physiological condition group. Acoustical analyses, including GLIMPES [I. R. Titze, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 75, 570–580 (1984)], derived mean fundamental frequency, intensity, harmonics-to-noise ratio [E. Yumoto, W. J. Gould, and T. Baer, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 71, 1544–1550 (1982)], amplitude perturbation and period perturbation. Multiple regressions revealed that this set of variables was a significant predictor (p < 0.01) of age ratings. Implications regarding acoustic measures related to listeners perception of aging and associated laryngeal characteristics will be discussed. [Work supported in part by NIA.]