Speech timing strategies in elderly adults

This study investigated two speech timing patterns in healthy elderly adults. Earlier research reported that young adults adjust consonant duration according to: (1) utterance length and (2) spatial distance between the consonant articulation and adjacent vowel target. Specifically, fricative durations decreased with increases in utterance length and fricative durations were found to be longer in final vowel /i/ environments than /α/ environments. DiSimoni (1974a-c) found that the first of these patterns emerged in children between three and six years of age but the second, " lineal compensation", was not yet statistically evident even in his nine-year-old subjects. The present investigation examined the speech of ten elderly subjects (67-81 years) for the presence of these temporal patterns; the results were compared to 21-28-year-old controls. Although overall speech rate of the older adults was significantly slower, older and younger subject groups both exhibited the two " compensatory" effects under investigation, supporting the view that speech timing control may be somewhat resistant to effects of aging. Maintenance of anticipatory processing by older subjects may depend on slowed rate as a compensatory mechanism for reduced structural and physiological capabilities. Alternatively, increasing tendencies toward caution and concern with precision may account for slowed rate as well as preserved temporal efficiency.