EFFECT OF AGE AND GENDER ON ARTICULATION OF VOICED AND VOICELESS STOP CONSONANTS IN CZECH

Evaluation of precision of consonant articulation is commonly used metric in assessment of pathological speech. However, up to date most of the research on consonant characteristics was performed on English while there are obvious language-specific differences. The aim of the current study was therefore to investigate the patterns of consonant articulation in Czech across 6 stop consonants with respect to age and gender. The database used consisted of 30 female and 30 male healthy participants. Four acoustic variables including voice onset time (VOT), VOT ratio and two spectral moments were analyzed. The Czech plosives /p/, /t/ and /k/ were found to be characterized by short voicing lag (average VOT ranged from 14 to 32 ms) while voiced plosives /b/, /d/ and /g/ by long voicing lead (average VOT ranged from -79 to -91 ms). Furthermore, we observed significantly longer duration of both VOT (p < 0.05) and VOT ratio (p < 0.01) of voiceless plosives in female compared to male gender. Finally, we revealed a significant negative correlation between age and duration of voiceless (r = -0.36, p < 0.05) as well as voiced VOT (r = -0.45, p = 0.01) in female but not in male participants.