A comparative study of kinematic and acoustic age- related variability in speech

In this study, we compared age-related lip movement variability with acoustic variability across repetitions using Functional Data Analysis (FDA). Lip movement and acoustic data of 1520 repetitions of a short Swedish phrase from 50 Swedish speakers were collected. Results showed weak to moderate negative correlations for age and variability in lip movements, phrase duration and sound pressure level, which confirm previous studies of decreasing variability in speech with age. Variability in F0 did not vary with age, and this may be because we tend to vary our intonation in speech both unconciously when we are learning to speak, and conciously as adult speakers. This will be explored further in a follow-up study.