Talker intelligibility: Child and adult listener performance

Abstract

In a study of talker intelligibility, 45 voices (adults, 11–12 year old children) were presented to 135 listeners (adults, 11–12, and 7–8 year olds). Word materials were presented in a ‘‘single-word’’ condition, and in a ‘‘triplet’’ condition, where a ‘‘normalizing’’ precursor sentence preceded three keywords. In both conditions, voices were randomized, with no consecutive presentations from the same speaker. The specially designed word-set consisted of 124 words chosen to maximize consonant confusions. Adult female speakers were significantly more intelligible than other groups, as predicted by previous research, but the difference was small. The error rates for 7–8 year olds were slightly but significantly higher than those for the older children and adults. The effect of presentation condition, however, was not significant for any listener group. Across all listener groups, rankings of speakers by error rates were strikingly consistent, with a distinct cluster of eight low-intelligibility speakers common to all listener groups. This suggests that speaker intelligibility is little influenced by listener-related factors. In terms of their perception of speaker characteristics, children aged seven and above are showing similar patterns of behavior to adults, even though the younger children showed marginally higher error rates. [Work funded by the Wellcome Trust.]