Speech production: Gender and age differences in VOT VIU Hauptseminar: Speaker characteristics Referentin: Antonia Schulz Dozent: Prof. J. Harrington Ludwig Maximilian Universität München IPS

Gender differences F0 F0 is higher in women (210Hz) than men (120Hz) Women have a higher variability in F0 than men (Traunmüller, 1996) Vowels Women produce more open-mouthed vowels than men (Henton, 1995) Men reduce their vowels more often which could lead to a shorter sentence duration (Whiteside, 1995) Duration Woman have longer vowels and they produce greater differences between long and short volwel categories (Simpson, 2003) Women tend to use more pauses (Whiteside, 1995)

Voice Onset Time Definition: VOT is the length of time that passes between when a consonant is released and when voicing, the vibration of the vocal folds, begins.

Experiment 1: Robb, 2005 Experiment: - 20 participants, average age 20 - read 6 plosives in initial CV combination with /i a u/ in the carrier phrase „ It`s a WORD“ - laboratory and a non-laboratory setting

Experiment 1 Mean VOT for voiceless/voiced plosives for male and female speakers.

Experiment 1 Results: - The laboratory environment caused a longer VOT in both genders - In the non-laboratory setting women produced longer VOT than men - Women produced significantly longer VOT than men for voiceless plosives in the non-laboratory setting

Experiment 2: Karlsson, 2004 Experiment: - 24 participants from Umea - 3 age groups (3 (young), 9 (prechange), 28(adult) years) - no hearing or speech development problems - The words had initial voiced, voiceless aspirated and voiceless-unaspirated plosives - The participants were shown slides with hand-drawn pictures

Experiment 2 Results: - Females of the „young“ and „prechange“ group produced aspirated voiceless plosives with longer VOT than the males - The adult female participants produced shorter VOT in the voiced unaspirated plosives than the males - reason for this could be airflow differences

Experiment 3: Whiteside, 2001 Experiment: - 30 children from Sheffield, aged 7, 9 and 11 years - Plosives /p b t d/ followed by the vowel /i/ - naming silver letters: „Silver WORD“

Mean VOT values for /t/ /d/ (left) and /p/ /b/ (right)

Experiment 3 Mean VOT values for /pb/ Mean VOT values for /td/

Experiment 4: Whiteside 2004 Experiment: - 50 participants, from Sheffield - 5 age groups (5, 7, 9, 11,13 years) - Repeat 6 plosives in syllable initial position in the sentence „say WORD again“ - Stimuli: /pi, bi, ti, di, ki, gi, pat, bat, tat, dat, kad, gad/

Experiment 4 Result: - Females have longer VOT values than males, especially the 13 year olds - VOT values in context of /i/ were higher across all age groups - 5 year olds had a tendency for longer VOT than other age groups - 7 year old females had longer VOT for /da/, and at age 9 for /pa/ and /da/; males at the age of 11 in /bi/

Conclusion - Results show that there are age related changes that affect VOT values - female speakers show a general increase in VOT compared to men - Individual differences could cause inconsistent results

Thank you for your attention!