Abstract
Cognitive hearing science is mainly about the study of how cognitive factors contribute to speech comprehension, but cognitive factors also partake in speech processing to infer non-linguistic information from speech signals, such as the intentions of the talker and the speaker’s age. Here, we report two experiments on age estimation by “naïve” listeners. The aim was to study how speech rate influences estimation of speaker age by comparing the speakers’ natural speech rate with increased or decreased speech rate. In Experiment 1, listeners were presented with audio samples of read speech from three different speaker age groups (young, middle aged, and old adults). They estimated the speakers as younger when speech rate was faster than normal and as older when speech rate was slower than normal. This speech rate effect was slightly greater in magnitude for older (60–65 years) speakers in comparison with younger (20–25 years) speakers, suggesting that speech rate may gain greater importance as a perceptual age cue with increased speaker age. This pattern was more pronounced in Experiment 2, in which listeners estimated age from spontaneous speech. Faster speech rate was associated with lower age estimates, but only for older and middle aged (40–45 years) speakers. Taken together, speakers of all age groups were estimated as older when speech rate decreased, except for the youngest speakers in Experiment 2. The absence of a linear speech rate effect in estimates of younger speakers, for spontaneous speech, implies that listeners use different age estimation strategies or cues (possibly vocabulary) depending on the age of the speaker and the spontaneity of the speech. Potential implications for forensic investigations and other applied domains are discussed.
Highlights
Cognitive hearing science is mainly about how cognitive factors contribute to speech comprehension (Arlinger et al, 2009), such as how working memory (Rönnberg et al, 2013) and long-term memory (Sörqvist et al, 2014) supports speech comprehension in adverse listening conditions, and how the mind tries to predict upcoming information in the unfolding speech stream (Bendixen et al, 2009)
The analysis revealed a main effect of speaker age group, F(2,160) = 691.72, MSE = 24.26, p < 0.001, η2p = 0.90, a main effect of speech rate, F(2,160) = 70.69, MSE = 17.89, FIGURE 1 | Age estimation in Experiment 1 calculated as the average of the signed differences between the age estimations and chronological age of the speakers
A 2 × 2 analysis of variance with age estimates collapsed across age groups and speech rates was computed to explore general effects of gender
Summary
Cognitive hearing science is mainly about how cognitive factors contribute to speech comprehension (Arlinger et al, 2009), such as how working memory (Rönnberg et al, 2013) and long-term memory (Sörqvist et al, 2014) supports speech comprehension in adverse listening conditions, and how the mind tries to predict upcoming information in the unfolding speech stream (Bendixen et al, 2009). Indexical information of a person (see Harnsberger et al, 2008) such as gender, age, height, and weight can be extracted with some certainty from voice alone (Krauss et al, 2002; Hughes and Gallup, 2008). Age estimation form of cognitive speech processing. It explores in two experiments how variations in one aspect of the speech signal—speech rate—influence age estimation. The results may have implications for various applied areas such as acting (e.g., Werner, 1996), speech synthesis (e.g., Schötz, 2006), speech and hearing disorders (e.g., Harnsberger et al, 2008) and forensic investigations (e.g., Yarmey et al, 1996)
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