Have a break: Aging effects on sentence production and structuring in French

Résumé En

Across life span there is inter alia a change in respiration in that with increasing age, the ribcage cannot expand and contract as well during breathing and the diaphragm becomes weakened. These changes are expected to affect the control of breathing and thus also prosodic structuring. Studiesinvestigating the effects of aging on speech breathing with respect to prosodic structuring are relatively sparse and mostly limited to English. Investigating the behaviour of the speech system in the aged population will provide insights into how linguistic structures are realized on differentphonological and prosodic tiers, when the physical system is challenged. In this study, we investigate the effects of aging on durational parameters related to sentence structuring (i.e., length and complexity) in French. The results provide evidence that (i) both age groups (younger and older speakers) produce phrasal breaks at expected syntactic boundaries, with (pause) durations that are sensitive to sentence structure. Furthermore, (ii) a clear age effect can be observed: older speakers produce longer pauses, longer sentence durations and lower articulation rates across all structures than younger speakers.