Lexical and Acoustic Characteristics of Young and Older Healthy Adults
Lexical and Acoustic Characteristics of Young and Older Healthy Adults
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DOI：
10.1044/2020_jslhr-19-00384
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发表时间：
2021-02-01
影响因子：
2.6
通讯作者：
Grossman, Murray
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Cho, Sunghye;Nevler, Naomi;Grossman, Murray
目的：本研究探讨了年龄对语言使用的影响与自动分析的数字化语音从半结构化，叙事语音样本。方法：我们研究了37名老年人和76名年轻健康参与者制作的Cookie盗窃图片描述。使用现代自然语言处理和自动语音识别工具，我们自动注释了所有标记的词性类别，计算了时态变化动词的数量，平均从句长度和词汇多样性，并对名词和动词的五个词汇特征进行了评级：词频，熟悉度，具体性，习得年龄和语义歧义。我们还将语音信号分割成语音和无声，并计算声学特征，例如总语音时间、平均语音和停顿段持续时间以及音高值。结果如下：年长的发言者比年轻的参与者产生了更多的填充词，代词和动词，更少的连词，限定词，名词和介词。与年轻人相比，年长者的名词和动词更熟悉，更频繁（仅限于动词），也更不含糊。年长的发言者产生较短的条款，较低的词汇多样性比年轻的参与者。他们还产生了更短的语音片段和更长的停顿，增加了总的语音时间和总字数。最后，我们观察到的音高范围的年龄和性别的相互作用。结论：我们的研究结果表明，老年人的词汇内容是不太多样化，这些扬声器产生较短的条款比年轻的参与者在独白，叙事演讲。我们的研究结果表明，半结构化语音样本的词汇和声学特征可以用自动化方法进行检查。
Purpose: This study examines the effect of age on language use with an automated analysis of digitized speech obtained from semistructured, narrative speech samples. Method: We examined the Cookie Theft picture descriptions produced by 37 older and 76 young healthy participants. Using modern natural language processing and automatic speech recognition tools, we automatically annotated part-of-speech categories of all tokens, calculated the number of tense-inflected verbs, mean length of clause, and vocabulary diversity, and we rated nouns and verbs for five lexical features: word frequency, familiarity, concreteness, age of acquisition, and semantic ambiguity. We also segmented the speech signals into speech and silence and calculated acoustic features, such as total speech time, mean speech and pause segment durations, and pitch values. Results: Older speakers produced significantly more fillers, pronouns, and verbs and fewer conjunctions, determiners, nouns, and prepositions than young participants. Older speakers' nouns and verbs were more familiar, more frequent (verbs only), and less ambiguous compared to those of young speakers. Older speakers produced shorter clauses with a lower vocabulary diversity than young participants. They also produced shorter speech segments and longer pauses with increased total speech time and total number of words. Lastly, we observed an interaction of age and sex in pitch ranges. Conclusions: Our results suggest that older speakers' lexical content is less diverse, and these speakers produce shorter clauses than young participants in monologic, narrative speech. Our findings show that lexical and acoustic characteristics of semistructured speech samples can be examined with automated methods.