The MonPaGe_HA Database for the Documentation of Spoken French Throughout Adulthood

The MonPaGe_HA Database for the Documentation of Spoken French Throughout Adulthood Cécile Fougeron1, Véronique Delvaux2, Lucie Ménard3, Marina Laganaro4 LPP-UMR7018 CNRS/Sorbonne Nouvelle1, FNRS & UMONS2, UQAM3, University of Geneva4 Paris, France1, Mons, Belgique2, Montreal, Canada3, Geneva, Switzerland4 cecile.fougeron@univ-paris3.fr, veronique.delvaux@umons.ac.be, menard.lucie@uqam.ca, marina.laganaro@unige.ch Abstract Our knowledge of life-span changes in the speech of adults is quite sparse. Existing reports are mainly based on English speakers and few studies have compared more than two extreme age groups. The present paper describes the recently constituted MonPaGe_HealthyAdults database of spoken French including 405 male and female speakers aged from 20 to 93 years old. This database aims at documenting speech throughout adulthood and at building a set of reference values for healthy speakers to be used in clinical assessment of speech. The database is built on five age groups ([20-39], [40-49], [50-59], [60-74], [75+]) and includes 4 regiolects. Speakers have been recorded on a variety of linguistic material and speech tasks in order to cover multiple speech dimensions for each speaker. These cross-sectional data form one of the largest French database available for observing typical changes in the speech of adults as a function of age, and especially in older adults. Keywords: French, speech corpus, aging, lifespan changes 1. Introduction Understanding potential changes in voice and speech throughout adulthood is critical for clinical research and practice, especially when dealing with neurodegenerative disorders. Data have to be age-standardized in order to tease apart speech characteristics due to age from characteristics due to the speech disorders. It is also crucial for our general understanding of the complexity of the speech production system since age-related changes can as well originate from structural changes at the peripheral level (anatomical and physiological changes in the speech apparatus affecting pulmonary function, laryngeal structure and/or vocal tract length), or from neurological changes affecting speech motor control or cognitive functions (e.g. Linville, 2001; Torre & Barlow, 2009; Seidler et al. 2010, Bilodeau-Mercure et al. 2016). To date, our knowledge of life-span changes in the speech of adults is quite sparse. Documented in a variety of studies, age-related changes in the production of voice and speech have been reported for (a) voice quality parameters (Ramig & Ringel, 1983; Linville 2001 ; Ferrand, 2002; Shötz 2007) ; (b) pitch/speaking f0, with an increase in mean f0 for older males and a decrease for older females and a greater within-subject variability for both (Benjamin 1986, Morris & Brown 1994 ; Russell et al., 1995 Harnsberger et al., 2008) ; (c) formant frequencies, with a global formant lowering, at least on F1 (Xue & Hao, 2003, Torre & Barlow, 2009), or a trend toward a centralization of formant values (Rastatter et al. 1997) ; (d) speech rate and segment duration, showing the most robust (and documented) age-related differences, with older speakers speaking more slowly, with longer segments, and sometimes longer VOTs, and greater within-subject temporal variability, than younger adults (Ramig 1983, Morris & Brown 1994, Bilodeau-Mecure & Tremblay 2016; Verhoeven et al., 2004; Jacewicz et al., 2009; …

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