The Trajectory of Voice Onset Time with Vocal Aging
This research addresses how vocal aging influences subtle acoustic features in speech, which is relevant for linguistics and aging studies, but it is incremental as it applies existing statistical methods to a new dataset.
The study analyzed Queen Elizabeth's Christmas speeches over 50 years to investigate how vocal aging affects Voice Onset Time, finding that its variation range narrowed and mean value slightly decreased over time.
Vocal aging, a universal process of human aging, can largely affect one's language use, possibly including some subtle acoustic features of one's utterances like Voice Onset Time. To figure out the time effects, Queen Elizabeth's Christmas speeches are documented and analyzed in the long-term trend. We build statistical models of time dependence in Voice Onset Time, controlling a wide range of other fixed factors, to present annual variations and the simulated trajectory. It is revealed that the variation range of Voice Onset Time has been narrowing over fifty years with a slight reduction in the mean value, which, possibly, is an effect of diminishing exertion, resulting from subdued muscle contraction, transcending other non-linguistic factors in forming Voice Onset Time patterns over a long time.