Bottom-up and top-down effects on the perception of children's speech

Abstract

This study examined adult’s perception of spoken words produced by children and by other adults in audio-only (AO) and audiovisual (AV) contexts, to determine whether talker age affects the magnitude of AV benefit. One-syllable words produced by five 4-6 year old child talkers and five adult talkers were presented to 151 adult listeners at three signal-to-noise ratios. The SNRs were determined through pilot testing to be the ones at which adult and child talkers’ productions were recognized equally accurately in the AO condition. The magnitude of AV benefit was statistically equivalent for the adult and child talkers. However, lexical factors affected the perception of children and adults’ speech differently. Word frequency had a larger effect on the perception of children’s speech, perhaps reflecting listeners’ expectation that children would be especially unlikely to use a low frequency word. Lexical factors also affected the nature of listener errors: listeners were less likely to provide a low-frequency word when misperceiving a child than when misperceiving an adult. Listeners were also more likely to guess a word with a different CV structure than the target for children than for adults. Results suggest that listeners apply qualitatively different expectations when listening to adults and children.