Perception of talker height in children’s productions of sustained /ɑ/

Abstract

Children’s voices reflect changes in physical size as they grow. At a previous ASA meeting, we showed that adult listeners can estimate the height of child talkers, ages 5–18 years, from /hVd/ syllables. The present study focuses on listener judgments of child talker height from a sustained /ɑ/ vowel, which lacks durational cues and transitions between phonological segments. The stimuli for this experiment were 1-s excerpts with stable amplitude and fundamental frequency (F0) from sustained /ɑ/ tokens by 174 talkers (including those from the /hVd/ experiment). 18 adult listeners judged talker sex and height for each token. Judgments of each talker’s height were consistent across the two experiments. Perceived talker height was moderately correlated with actual height (r = .66). When talker sex was identified incorrectly, height was underestimated for taller females and overestimated for males. Consistent with our previous study, significant relationships were observed between listener judgments of talker height and acoustic measures (geometric mean of the lowest three formants, F0, and additional variables related to the voicing source). The results extend findings from the previous study, showing that the relationship between summary acoustic measures and perception of talker height is preserved when the stimuli comprise only sustained /ɑ/.