Links between the perception of speaker age and sex in children's voices

Abstract

At a recent meeting [Assmann et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 135, 2424 (2014)] we reported two experiments on the perception of speaker age and sex in children's voices, along with two models to predict listeners’ judgments. The stimuli were vocoded /hVd/ syllables produced by 140 speakers, ages 5 through 18, processed to simulate a change in the sex of the speaker. Experimental conditions involved swapping the fundamental frequency (F0) contour and/or the formant frequencies (FF) to the opposite-sex average within each age group. The present study extended the original experiments by requiring each listener to judge both age and sex on each trial to investigate the relationship between the two perceptual responses. Results revealed that age estimation error is systematically linked to sex misclassification, particularly in older children. In the unswapped condition, age estimates tended to be lower if the voice was identified as male, relative to the same voice heard as female. The condition with both F0 and...