Effect of Ageing on Acoustic Characteristics of Voice Pitch and Formants in Czech Vowels.

BACKGROUND: The relevance of formant-based measures has been noted across a spectrum of medical, technical, and linguistic applications. Therefore, the primary aim of the study was to evaluate the effect of ageing on vowel articulation, as the previous research revealed contradictory findings. The secondary aim was to provide normative acoustic data for all Czech monophthongs. METHODS: The database consisted of 100 healthy speakers (50 men and 50 women) aged between 20 and 90. Acoustic characteristics, including vowel duration, vowel space area (VSA), fundamental frequency (fo), and the first to fourth formant frequencies (F1-F4) of 10 Czech vowels were extracted from a reading passage. In addition, the articulation rate was calculated from the entire duration of the reading passage. RESULTS: Age-related changes in pitch were sex-dependent, while age-related alterations in F2/a/, F2/u/, VSA, and vowel duration seemed to be sex-independent. In particular, we observed a clear lowering of fo with age for women, but no change for men. With regard to formants, we found lowering of F2/a/ and F2/u/ with increased age, but no statistically significant changes in F1, F3, or F4 frequencies with advanced age. Although the alterations in F1 and F2 frequencies were rather small, they appeared to be in a direction against vowel centralization, resulting in a significantly greater VSA in the older population. The greater VSA was found to be related partly to longer vowel duration. CONCLUSIONS: Alterations in vowel formant frequencies across several decades of adult life appear to be small or in a direction against vowel centralization, thus indicating the good preservation of articulatory precision in older speakers.

The Prosody of the Czech Discourse Marker 'Jasne': An Analysis of Forms and Functions.

Words like yeah, okay and (al)right are fairly unspecific in their lexical semantics, and not least for this reason there is a general tendency for them to occur with highly varied and expressive prosodic patterns across languages. Here we examine in depth the prosodic forms that express eight pragmatic functions of the Czech discourse marker jasne, including resignation, reassurance, surprise, indifference or impatience. Using a collection of 172 tokens from a corpus of scripted dialogues by 30 native speakers, we performed acoustic analyses, applied classification algorithms and solicited judgments from native listeners in a perceptual experiment. There appeared to be multi-parametric differences between jasne realizations in terms of their F0, timing and intensity patterns, which gave rise to generally consistent form-function mappings. For example, resignation seems to be realized with a falling intonation contour, relatively slow tempo, long wordinitial consonant and a short word-final vowel. Although the most significant prosodic parameters used for clustering analysis involved segment durations, all pragmatic functions were expressed by patterns of multiple features.

Phoneme awareness is a key component of alphabetic literacy skills in consistent and inconsistent orthographies: evidence from Czech and English children.

Two studies investigated the importance of phoneme awareness relative to other predictors in the development of reading and spelling among children learning a consistent orthography (Czech) and an inconsistent orthography (English). In Study 1, structural equation models revealed that Czech (n=107) and English (n=71) data were fitted well by the same predictors of reading and spelling. Phoneme awareness was a unique predictor in all models. In Study 2, Czech (n=40) and English (n=27) children with dyslexia showed similar deficits on phoneme awareness relative to their age- and spelling-matched control peers. Phoneme awareness appears to be a core component skill of alphabetic literacy, which is equally important for learners of consistent and inconsistent orthographies.