Age-related effects of prosodic prominence in vowel articulation

Résumé En

The aim of the present study is to investigate the effect of aging on prosodic prominence in German. Therefore, we recorded older and younger speakers with Electromagnetic Articulography to track tongue body movements during the production of vowels. Both speaker groups maintainprominence relations by adjustments of the supra-laryngeal system. This is the case across accentuation (accented vs. unaccented syllables) as well as within accentuation (syllables in broad vs. contrastive focus). The groups differ in the way they use highlighting strategies, i.e., older speakers showstronger modifications in the temporal domain than younger speakers, leading to an increase of sonority in the perceptual domain. Analogously to effects of aging on gross motor control (limb coordination) reported in the literature, our data reveal longer and asymmetrical movement patterns in terms of prolonged deceleration phases across all focus conditions. However, an overall slowing down of the maximum velocities of the tongue body movement cannot be confirmed in our data.