VARIABILITY IN SPACE, COMPENSATION IN TIME: EFFECTS OF AGING ON TONGUE BODY KINEMATICS IN PROSODIC FOCUS MARKING
Résumé
The study investigated how the movements of the tongue vary across different ages for prosodic focus marking. We collected articulatory recordings from 44 German speakers, aged 19 to 79 years, and analyzed the phonetic characteristics of vowel production, such as position, velocity, and duration of the vocalic gesture. Across all ages we found more extreme vocal tract configurations to signal prominence, but the variability of the target positions in the vowels was considerably higher with advancing age. The spatial modifications were accompanied by longer vocalic movements of the tongue body under prominence induced by longer deceleration phases for all speakers. While younger speakers showed a fine-grained temporal marking for all degrees of prominence under investigation (background, broad and contrastive focus), older speakers produced durational differences only to differentiate between unaccented and accented conditions (background vs. broad/contrastive focus). Interestingly, the highlighting strategies were less fine-grained but considerably strengthened with advancing age.
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