Az alapfrekvencia jellemzőinek longitudinális összevetése felnőtt beszélők felolvasásában

Absztrakt

The speech changes with age, in several aspects. With respect to fundamental frequency (f0), there is a wealthy of cross-sectional analyses of changes. However, longitudinal analyses are rare, due to the methodological difficulties even though these studies are able to control many of the variables which are not controlled in most of the cross-sectional analyses. In the present paper, the change of the fundamental frequency (f0) was studied in young adults’ speech within a ten-year long interval. Most studies that describe f0 across life span embrace larger time intervals, however, the observations on short-term changes can be applied with various respects.

The present study analysed the f0 characteristics in 20 young adults’ sentence reading with ten year difference between the recordings of the same healthy speakers. At the time of first recording, the speakers (10 males and 10 females) were at the age of 20-45 years, while they were between 30 and 55 years at the second recording’s time. Besides the average f0, the overall f0 range of the recordings and the utterance level f0 range were measured.

The results showed that the f0 mean decreased in female speakers, but no clear tendency was found in male speakers within the analysed 10 years. The overall f0 range of the recordings did not change in the analysed time interval, however, at the utterance level, the f0 range was higher in the second recording. The data showed considerable interspeaker variability.

The results (and the database) are relevant for forensic phonetic applications and can serve as baselines for speech pathology research.