Distinguishing Dick from Jane: Children's voices are more difficult to identify than adults' voices

Abstract

Previous research on talker recognition has focused on the processing of talker identity in adult voices; however, little is known about how listeners identify child voices. This study examined adult listeners’ ability to differentiate and identify child voices (2.5-year-olds) and adult voices. In Experiment 1, native English-speaking listeners completed an AX voice discrimination task with both child and adult voices. Results revealed that listeners were significantly worse at discriminating between child voices relative to adult voices, regardless of the fact that child voices were mixed gender and adult voices were all female. In Experiment 2, we examined whether listeners could learn to identify child and adult voices. Adult listeners completed an adaptive training paradigm, where they learned to identify 4 child voices on one day and 4 adult voices on a separate day. Preliminary results indicate that with training, listeners can learn to identify voices from both age groups above chance. However, listeners were still faster at learning and more accurate at identifying adult relative to child voices. Taken together, these findings are an initial step towards understanding how talker recognition is influenced by the acoustic-phonetic characteristics and articulatory capabilities that vary with talker age.