Presented at the 28th World Congress of the International Association of Logopedics and Phoniatrics, Athens, Greece, 22–26 August 2010

Aim: In this study we examine the effects that menopause has on the acoustic characteristics of voice and speech in two groups of women, one who is premenopause and one group after the menopause.
Method: Sixty women were randomly selected and allocated into two groups. The first group consists of 30 premenopause women with mean age of 45 years and the second of 30 postmenopause women with mean age of 55 years. Subjects with history of gynecological or hormonal related health problems were excluded.
The assessment protocol consisted of number of tests, for acoustic measures and rate of speech. The tasked used were: sustained phonation, reading a list of words, reading texts, and one minute monologue describing a picture. For the analysis of the recorded data we used the Praat program. For the statistical analysis the Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test was used.
Results: Our results have shown that the premenopause group has significant higher pitch during speaking and reading. Regarding voice characteristics the same group has significantly higher fundamental frequency during a sustained vowel production. However the duration of each vowel during word reading in both stressed and unstressed syllables was significant longer in the post menopause group. Regarding the formats, the results has shown decrease in F1 in some of the vowels and increase in F2 in others. Regarding speech rate, premenopause women speak in a higher rate producing more syllables per minute comparing to post menopause women in both speaking and reading.
Discussion: Our results confirm previous findings about vocal changes in post menopause women. However, these changes are associated with changes in speech characteristics such as speech rate and vowel duration. These changes might be considered as compensatory mechanisms to changes of voice production, or could be related to the menopause itself or to aging.