Two groups of women, one aged 20–35 years and the other aged 75 years and older, read the ‘Rainbow Passage’ and produced the vowel /a/ at minimum, conversational, and maximum intensity levels. The results indicate that the two groups did not exhibit significant differences in speech intensity for the reading passage or the conversational level vowel productions. On the other hand, the older women exhibited significantly higher minimum and significantly lower maximum intensity vowels than the younger