Abstract
Previous research [Assmann et al., J. Acoust Soc. Am 138, 1811 (2015)] investigated normal-hearing (NH) listeners’ ability to discriminate age and gender in children’s speech. Speech stimuli (/hVd/ syllables from 140 speakers between 5 and 18 years of age) were processed using STRAIGHT to simulate a change in perceived gender. Experimental conditions involved swapping the fundamental frequency (F0) contour and/or formant frequencies (FF) to the opposite-sex average at each age level. This research was extended by presenting the stimuli to cochlear implant (CI) users. Preliminary results from two CI users have led to two main conclusions. First, whereas NH listeners used both F0 and FF to discriminate voice gender, CI users relied primarily on F0. Second, NH listeners and CI users demonstrated differential patterns of voice gender misclassification, particularly in the case of young children. NH listeners, while frequently making errors, identified a majority of young boys as male and young girls as female. In contrast, CI users identified most young children as female.
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