Effect of aging on speech features and phoneme recognition: a study on Bengali voicing vowels

The article studies age related variations of speech characteristics of two age groups, in the Bengali language. The study considers 60 speakers in the each age groups, 60– 80 years and 20–40 years, respectively. We have considered different voice source features like fundamental frequency, formant frequencies, jitter, shimmer and harmonic to noise ratio. Cepstral domain feature, Mel Frequency Cepstral coefficients (MFCC) of different voiced Bengali vowels are also analyzed for younger and older adult groups. MFCC feature and Hidden Markov model parameter of different voiced vowels are used to study phoneme dissimilarities measure between two age groups. Age related changes in elderly speech affect the automatic speech recognition performance as was observed in our study, raising the need for specific acoustic models for elderly persons.