A Longitudinal Study of Speech Acoustics in Older French Females: Analysis of the Filler Particle euh across Utterance Positions

Aging in speech production is a multidimensional process. Biological, cognitive, social, and communicative factors can change over time, stay relatively stable, or may even compensate for each other. In this longitudinal work, we focus on stability at the laryngeal supralaryngeal levels discourse particle euh produced by 10 older French-speaking females two times, years apart. Recognizing multiple roles of euh, divided out occurrences according to utterance position. We quantified frequency evaluated acoustic changes formants, fundamental frequency, voice quality across time Results showed that was stable with age. The only measure revealed an age effect harmonics-to-noise ratio, showing less noise ages. Other measures mostly varied position, sometimes interaction Some could reflect adjustments provide airflow conservation utterance-finally. data suggest aging effects be evident some prosodic positions (e.g., utterance-final position), but not others (utterance-initial position). Thus, it essential consider interactions among these future work assume vocal throughout signal.