Cognitive Maturation and the Use of Pitch and Rate Information in Making Similarity Judgments of a Single Talker

Abstract

This study examined age-related differences in speaker similarity judgments, in which acoustic cues known to be important in speaker and speech recognition and identification were varied. Four groups of listeners of 5- to 6-, 8- to 9-, 10- to 11-, and 25- to 30-year-olds were asked to judge the similarity between an original talker's speech sample and 9 versions of a second speech sample from the same talker, obtained by manipulating the pitch and speech rate. Results showed that although pitch was used by all age groups as information to judge the similarity between the single talker speech samples, there was a significant age-related increase in the weight of speech rate attributed to similarity judgments. Furthermore, an age-related effect in accuracy was found, as was an effect of pitch level for the younger group. The use of relevant acoustic features to discriminate a speaker changes with age, probably arising from a shift in cue weighting strategy as described by the developmental weighting strategy hypothesis (S. Nittrouer, C. Manning, & G. Meyer, 1993). Future studies should clarify whether the present findings can be extended to any pair of acoustic cues and should involve longitudinal methods to precisely detect when the strategy shift occurs.