Abstract
Previous work by the authors emphasized temporal characteristics of speech as critical cues in age estimation. The present study assessed the role of the same temporal cues in listener perception of vocal pleasantness (PL). Twenty‐four speakers (12 male), ages 41–82 years, read the passage “My Grandfather” and prolonged /aeiou/. With the first two sentences of “My Grandfather” as the stimulus, 22 college‐age naive listeners (11 male) judged speaker PL on a five point scale. The times to initiate and to terminate /aeiou/, the time to articulate /maɪ gnændfðɚ/, reading rate, pause time within the passage, and speaker sex were regressed against PL. The single best predictor for PL was reading rate (R‐square = 0.48) and the best significant model (12 variables) for PL yielded R‐square = 0.77. Similar to age estimation, the perception of PL appeared to be strongly influenced by temporal characteristics of speech. While the contributions of individual variables differ, the results suggest that estimations of age and pleasantness involve closely related perceptual processes.
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