Influences of listener characteristics on perceived age estimations

Abstract

Current interest in gerontology has encouraged investigators to seek a better understanding of the changes associated with the aging process. The area of voice research is no exception, with numerous investigations providing information with respect to the physiological, perceptual, and acoustic parameters of the aging voice. One area of particular interest is that of so-called vocal senility (1). Despite numerous investigations that refute this concept, it still lingers on, presumably because of its intuitive appeal. While the scientific community and voice professionals may be aware of this erroneous assumption, it is possible that the general public's perception of the senescent voice may be influenced by its perception of what an older voice should sound like. Therefore, it is the purpose of this investigation to isolate possible perceptual influences of the type cited. It has been demonstrated that untrained listeners are able to make reasonably good estimates of speaker age~from taped voice samples (2,3). Nonetheless, despite the generally strong link between perceived age and chronological age, a number of investigatorg have observed that the perceived age of older speakers tends to be underestimated. This relationship led Hollien and Tolhurst (4) to suggest that listeners were able to judge the age of a speaker reasonably well only if their ages were similar to those of the talkers. The findings of several investigations support the idea of a relationship between listener and talker age. For example, Shipp and Hollien (2) had reported that their college-age listeners tended to slightly overestimate the age of