Abstract
This study investigates acoustic changes in the speech of European Portuguese children, as a function of age and gender. Fundamental frequency, formant frequencies and duration of vowels produced by a group of 30 children, ages 7 and 10 years, were measured. The results revealed that, for male speakers, F0, F1 and F2 decrease as age increases, although the age effect was not statistically significant for F0 and F1. A similar trend was observed for female speakers, but only in F2. Moreover, F0 and formant frequencies were found to be similar between male and female children. Between ages 7 and 10, vowel durations decreased significantly, and the values for females were higher than those for males. These results provide a base of information for establishing the normal pattern of development in European Portuguese children.
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Oliveira, C., Cunha, M.M., Silva, S., Teixeira, A., Sá-Couto, P. (2012). Acoustic Analysis of European Portuguese Oral Vowels Produced by Children. In: Torre Toledano, D., et al. Advances in Speech and Language Technologies for Iberian Languages. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 328. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35292-8_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35292-8_14
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