Abstract
The purpose of this study was to determine the acoustic and perceptual features a group of listeners would use to separate a set of women's voices into clusters. The speakers for the study were ten women who were 20–30 years old and ten women who were 75–90 years old. Each woman produced a 3‐s sustained /ɑ/ at comfortable frequency and intensity levels. Each vowel was paired with all the others in both the first and second position. Thus there were 400 vowel pairs, plus 10% duplication for determining listener reliability for a total of 440 vowel pairs on the experimental tape. The listeners were 30 undergraduate students who rated the vowel pairs on a five‐point scale from 1, representing the greatest dissimilarity, to 5, representing identical vowels. These ratings were then analyzed using a discriminant analysis paradigm. The results will be discussed in relation to the clustering of the voices by age group as well as acoustic and perceptual features of the voices.
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