Estonian Elderly Speech Corpus - Design, Collection and Preliminary Acoustic Analysis

Elderly speech has been found challenging for automatic speech recognition systems due to the lack of suitable training data and due to age-related physiological changes affecting the acoustic characteristics of voice. The paper introduces the collection of the speech corpus of Estonian elderly speakers aged over 60 years and reports preliminary results of acoustic analysis of some prosodic characteristics. The corpus contains the recordings of spontaneous speech by 100 men and 100 women, on average 29 minutes of speech from each speaker with transcriptions. Acoustic analysis of elderly speech revealed that with age (1) F0 increases significantly in males and slightly decreases in females, (2) speech and articulation rates decrease in females, but not in males, (3) utterances are getting shorter, and (4) pauses are getting longer in females and shorter in males.