Longitudinal studies of adult speakers often investigate large time intervals or elderly speakers, however, the variance or change in young and middle aged adults’ speech is understudied, although, this question is relevant in some applied fields, e.g., forensic phonetics, where the speech materials to be compared are often recorded years apart.
Our research deals with the question of changes or variance in young and middle aged speakers’ speech in a mid term, 10 year time interval. Speakers of a Hungarian data base (Neuberger et al. 2014) were invited to participate in follow-up recording after ten years (Gráczi et al. 2020). The protocol includes spontaneous, semi-spontaneous and read speech tasks that are studied via forensic speaker verification tools, and with acoustic phonetic methods. The studies to be introduced in the talk have been carried out simultaneously with the recordings, therefore the numbers of the subjects are different in the specific analyses. The f0, the first four formants of vowels, the four spectral moments of obstruents, speech tempo and pauses (filled, silent, and combined) have been studied so far. F0 has been analysed in various speech types, while the spectral features have been studied only in read speech yet to control for the effect of the context.
The results show that despite the speech samples of the same speaker recorded with a ten years time span can be detected as more similar to each other than speech samples from two different speakers, the scores of the verification test do not reach the standard value of similarity for most speakers, while the acoustic measures show a diverse picture. Most of these vary without showing group level tendencies, except for the average f0 value of young female speakers.
In the talk, we will address the specific results, their possible explanations, and the next steps for synthesizing the results and to draw the main conclusions.
Gráczi, Tekla Etelka, Huszár, Anna, Krepsz, Valéria, Száraz, Bettina, Damásdi, Nóra, Markó, Alexandra: Longitudinális korpusz magyar felnőtt adatközlőkről. [Longitudinal Speech Corpora of Hungarian adult speakers]. Proceedings of Magyar Számítógépes Nyelvészeti Konferencia. Szeged, Hungary, 2020.
Neuberger, Tilda, Gyarmathy, Dorottya, Gráczi, Tekla Etelka, Horváth, Viktória, Gósy, Mária, Beke, András (2014) Development of a large spontaneous speech database of agglutinative Hungarian language. In: 17th International Conference, TSD 2014, September 8-12, 2014., Brno.