Age-related differences in acoustical aspects of contrastive stress in women

The purpose of this investigation was to compare the fundamental frequency (F0), durational, and sound pressure characteristics of speech during production of contrastive stress, a suprasegmental component of speech, in young adult and elderly women. Results indicate that, while both groups significantly increased F0, duration, and sound pressure level during production of contrastive stress, elderly women increased F0 to a significantly greater extent than young women and, for all acoustic parameters, the groups were dissimilar in position effects. In spite of the age related differences, such differences did not appear to limit the ability of elderly women to provide linguistic information through prosody. However, they may do so differently from young women. These findings may have implications in terms of treatment of speech disorders in the elderly.