Vocal aging effects on F0 and the first formant: A longitudinal analysis in adult speakers

This paper presents a longitudinal analysis of the extent to which age affects F-0 and formant frequencies. Five speakers at two time intervals showed a clear effect for F-0 and F-1 but no systematic effects for F-2 or F-3. In two speakers for which recordings were available in successive years over a 50 year period, results showed with increasing age a decrease in both F-0 and F-1 for a female speaker and a V-shaped pattern, i.e. a decrease followed by an increase in both F-0 and F-1 for a male speaker. This analysis also provided strong evidence that F-1 approximately tracked F-0 across the years: i.e., the rate of change of (the logarithm of) F-0 and F-1 were generally the same. We then also tested that the changes in F-1 were not an acoustic artifact of changing F-0. Perception experiments with the main aim of assessing whether changes in F-1 contributed to age judgments beyond those from F-0 showed that the contribution of F-1 was inconsistent and negligible. The general conclusion is that age-related changes in F-1 may be compensatory to offset a physiologically induced decline in F-0 and thereby maintain a relatively constant auditory distance between F-0 and F-1. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.