Effects of Aging on Vocal Fundamental Frequency and Vowel Formants in Men and Women.
Julie Traub Eichhorn, Raymond D Kent, Diane Austin and 1 others
PMID 28864082WHAT IT FOUND
Healthy women’s pitch and some vowel formants differed between young and middle-aged or older groups.
Men showed few differences, and higher formants were stable. Aging alone did not produce a consistent acoustic pattern.
Key findings
01Women showed significant age-related differences in fundamental frequency and some vowel formants between the young and middle-aged groups and between the young and older groups.
02Men showed only two significant age-group differences, both between young and older men.
03The study did not find vowel formant centralization or lowering across age cohorts.
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How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study included only 96 healthy adults, with small numbers in each age group, so it cannot show how most older adults change with age. It compared different people in different age groups rather than following the same people over time, so differences could reflect generation, hearing status, or other characteristics rather than aging itself. Most older participants had hearing loss, and hearing status was not used to exclude them, which may affect speech acoustics. The speech sample was 20 familiar single-syllable words, not connected speech, so findings may not apply to everyday voice or intelligibility. Some higher formant measurements were missing, especially F4, and outliers exceeding 2.576 SD were removed; this was less than 1.8% of data. The participants were healthy adults, not patients with voice or speech disorders, so the results may not apply to clinical populations.
Declared interests
No funding or conflict-of-interest declaration is provided in the supplied article text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that normal aging produces a predictable pattern of vowel formant change. The study found significant changes mainly in women, few differences in men, no differences in higher formants for women, and it compared different people at different ages rather than the same people over time.