Aging Voices and Speech Intelligibility: Implications for Communication by Older Talkers

The voice changes with normal aging. For instance, older adults may have more extreme values on measures of irregularities in fundamental frequency (jitter) and intensity (shimmer) than the voices of younger adults [1]. Listeners perceive such voices to be rougher [2] and perform more poorly on word recognition when speech has been synthetically jittered [3]. Given that some older adults have voices that naturally contain more of these irregularities, it is possible that their voices would be more difficult to understand in challenging noisy situations, and when their communication partners are experiencing age-related changes in auditory processing. To investigate the effects of voice quality on intelligibility, we recorded the speech of three older talkers who had different amounts of vocal jitter and shimmer. We predicted that intelligibility would relate to the voice quality of the talkers.