title: Acoustic correlates of [b] and [w] produced by normal young to elderly adults.
abstract: Various studies indicate that temporal characteristics of articulated subphonemic segments and syllables change as a function of age. The purpose of the present study was to investigate age-related changes in the production of a phonetic contrast--in particular that of the stop consonant [b] versus the semivowel [w]. Thirty-nine subjects with normal hearing and belonging to three age groups (20-30, 50-60, 70-80 years old) were tested. Acoustic analyses of the recorded syllables [b alpha] and [w alpha] indicated that duration of syllables, prevoicing, release, and vowel transition became significantly longer with the speaker's age, except for the vowel transition in the [w] context. However, acoustic cues, such as the difference in amplitude change in the vicinity of the release segment, were not sensitive to the effects of aging.
authors.affiliation: Psychology Department, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
authors.forename: E B
authors.initials: EB
authors.lastname: Slawinski
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010700:Phonetics; D012016:Reference Values; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013065:Speech Intelligibility