sxigcrgvni

As is the case with so many bodily functions, our voices change with aging.

The pitch of women’s voices becomes lower, while the pitch of men’s, oddly enough, drifts higher. Speech slows, with fewer words uttered between breaths. The voice gets weaker, harder to project, less consistent and more tremulous.

Underlying these changes are a gradual loss of muscle mass in the voice box,moncler doudoune, a stiffening of the cartilage that surrounds it and atrophy in the vocal cords. Mechanisms controlling the jaw, tongue, lips and soft palate begin to deteriorate, and fine muscle coordination involved with producing speech becomes more difficult.

All of this has been known for some time. What hasn’t been as clear is when these changes occur.

A provides a partial answer by analyzing 50 years of speeches delivered by , the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon Church) from 1995 until his death in 2008 at age 97. Mr,woolrich uomo. Hinckley was known for vastly expanding the church’s presence nationally as well as internationally during his tenure.

Every year from 1958 (when he was first appointed a senior full-time leader of the church) to 2007, Mr. Hinckley addressed the faculty and students of Brigham Young University. All of his talks were 40 minutes long, took place at the university’s basketball arena and were faithfully recorded.

, associate director of the National Center for Voice and Speech at the University of Utah, realized that the recordings provided a unique opportunity to study how Mr. Hinckley’s voice changed during the transition from middle to older age. To Dr. Hunter’s knowledge, only one other longitudinal study of this type had been undertaken: that , published in the journal Nature in 2000, found alterations in the quality of vowels articulated by Queen Elizabeth II during her yearly Christmas talks.

Unlike the queen, who undoubtedly had voice coaching, Mr. Hinckley was not known to have had any such guidance, Dr. Hunter said. What’s more, he was a very healthy older man who didn’t smoke or drink alcohol or coffee. In this sense, the changes in his voice were probably as close to “normal” as could be expected.

With the aid of students,woolrich outlet, Dr. Hunter set about analyzing five-minute segments from 36 speeches delivered by Mr. Hinckley. (To allow for a warm-up period, the segment started five minutes into the speech and ended at 10 minutes,louis vuitton sito ufficiale.) The pitch of the Mormon leader’s voice was run through a computer program to determine his average pitch, most-used pitch and range of pitch, so these could be compared over time.

Each segment was carefully transcribed,louis vuitton borse, with all words and sounds like “um” and “uh” included. The transcripts were then broken down into phonemes (basic bits of speech) so that the number of phonemes between breaths could be calculated. A panel of three judges listened to each segment and independently counted every breath and voice break (when someone starts to say a word but doesn’t quite get it out right away).

Dr. Hunter was surprised to discover that the pitch of Mr. Hinckley’s voice,doudoune moncler pas cher, which he describes as “traditional” with a “sing-songy” quality, dropped markedly between ages 50 and 60. Most research has suggested that after the stark changes of puberty, when the muscles in boys’ voice boxes swell and their pitches plummet, the quality of men’s voices remains relatively stable until their later years.

Mr. Hinckley’s pitch continued to drop,moncler pas cher, but at a slightly slower rate, from age 60 to age 68. Then it flattened out for about a year and started to climb upward.

“By the age of 74, the trend was completely in the other direction,” Dr. Hunter said,louis vuitton outlet. “The pitch was rising at about the same rate as it had fallen before,” while the number of phonemes per breath also declined.

His conclusion: For Mr. Hinckley at least, the period from 68 to 74 years of age was when major age-related voice changes first became evident. When Mr,http://www.woolrich-italy.com/. Hinckley was in his 80s, his speech began to slow noticeably; by his 90s, some slurring had started to become evident.

Pitch changes in older men, in particular, because of muscle-related deterioration in the voice box and vocal cords, Dr. Hunter suggested,borse louis vuitton. To compensate, he proposed, men unconsciously apply more “vocal force and stretch their cords,” which results in a higher-pitched sound.

Why the same phenomenon doesn’t occur in women isn’t known. Girls don’t undergo the same degree of bulking up of their voice box during puberty, and lower pitches are common after menopause. “What happens is that Grandma and Grandpa begin to sound more similar,” Dr. Hunter said.

Whether the timing of Mr. Hinckley’s voice change is typical or atypical can’t be determined from his study, since it examines one person only. Still, it’s suggestive.

Practically, changes in older adults’ voices and speech can have important consequences. If Grandma is already having some hearing problems a common phenomenon changes in how she talks and how she sounds can make communication even more difficult.

Also, since the mechanisms that the voice depends on are related to the swallowing mechanism, significant changes in the voice (an alteration of pitch, a change in strength or volume) may signify changes in swallowing to come.

“If we could establish this, we could encourage an older person to do muscle-strengthening techniques when their voices begin to alter,” Dr. Hunter said.

Going forward, his research will look at what techniques can best be used to maintain older people’s voices as they age. Research on this topic is scarce, and most interventions used today are drawn from research on younger and middle-age adults.

Are changes in your voice and speech or those of an older relative something you’ve noticed? Are they a problem?

is an economics professor at Harvard and the author of “,woolrich donna.”

Among the many wonderful things in the United States Constitution, the of Article 1, Section 2, is one of my favorites. That paragraph mandates an enumeration of each state’s population,louis vuitton sito ufficiale, the census, “within three years after the first meeting of the Congress of the United States,http://www.woolrich-italy.com/, and within every subsequent term of ten years,woolrich parka.”

The census is indispensable, not only to determine the apportionment of representatives and presidential electors,http://www.louisvuittonborseoutletitaly.com/, but also to give us a picture of our changing country. The 220 years of census data give us a picture of a nation constantly in flux,louis vuitton borse.

I’ve just released jointly written with Giacomo Ponzetto and Kristina Tobio that looks at county-level changes in America over the very long run. I’ve also released that looks at the county level over recent decades. Some trends persist, and others change dramatically over time,doudoune moncler pas cher.

For our work on the long run, we focused on the eastern United States those counties bounded by the 90th meridian (west), which is approximately the location of Memphis, and by the 30th parallel and 43rd parallels, which exclude southern Florida and northern New England. These restrictions allow us to focus on areas that were populated 150 years ago,louis vuitton outlet, at the beginning of the Civil War.

If we include the entire United States,doudoune moncler, population shifts are dominated by the continuing march westward,moncler pas cher.

It’s getting a little embarrassing.

We’ve been asking this question on Fridays since mid-September, and, unlike the hundreds of daily responses we field on our Monday through Thursday , we’re either getting who can’t be bothered to write a real question, or we’re getting ….

So what’,moncler pas cher;s wrong,woolrich donna? Should we discontinue this question? Students AND teachers, please tell us below.

Back story: We started posting this question weekly because we were so inspired by the we get every summer to the very same question, which we ask as part of our .

(Of course, in summer it’s the only question we ask,woolrich uomo, and we choose, and publish,http://www.louisvuittonborseoutletitaly.com/, winners each week. We’re beginning to see that those are important differences.)

But our real reason for starting the open-ended Friday question?

Because we believe students should have choice about what they read, and,louis vuitton sito ufficiale, knowing that more schools are upping the “informational text” requirements because of the demands of the Common Core, we wanted to offer a place where young people could interact with anything in The Times they liked, including informational graphics, videos, photographs and podcasts. Everything else on our blog, after all, is content we’ve chosen for you.

Meanwhile,louis vuitton outlet, we’,woolrich;ve published a this Friday, just to give you the choice. But we can’,borse louis vuitton;t do that every week.

Tell us: Should we recast our Friday question in some way (“What Interested You Most in The Times This Month?”)? Get rid of it entirely? Save it just for our summer contest,woolrich parka?

Let us know,doudoune moncler.

We invite both students and teachers to post here today. Thank you!