Abstract
Previous studies found that older speakers generally speak slower than younger speakers and further showed that listeners make use of this age-rate correlation in estimating speakers’ age. This study examines how speakers’ speech rates affect the perception of speaker age in conversational speech as well as how listeners’ own age affects age perception. After hearing a short dialogue in which two speakers’ speech rates were varied orthogonally, listeners estimated the age of each speaker. The results showed that listeners judged slower voices as older than faster voices and this effect was more pronounced for older speakers. We found no effect of interlocutors’ speech rate, indicating that the listeners were able to reliably separate the speech rate information of the two speakers in the dialogue. We also found a significant effect of listeners’ own age; other things being equal, younger listeners judged the speakers to be younger than older listeners.
Highlights
Speech contains important information that listeners use to make inferences about speakers, such as age, height, and weight (Krauss et al 2002)
Studies that examined the effect of speech rate on age perception by manipulating speech rate while controlling for other vocal features of the speakers found that a significant shift in perceived age could result from the manipulation of speech rate alone (Harnsberger et al 2008; Skoog Waller et al 2015)
Our study investigated the effectiveness of speech rate as a cue in age estimation
Summary
Speech contains important information that listeners use to make inferences about speakers, such as age, height, and weight (Krauss et al 2002). Listeners rely on different vocal features such as speech rate, pitch, and articulation, as well as the linguistic content of the spoken words to estimate speakers’ age in conversational speech (Hartman 1979; Moyse 2014). Among these vocal characteristics, speech rate is a feature that is consistently found to be related to age. Results from cross sectional and longitudinal studies of English speakers suggest speech rate decreases in both men and women as age increases (Bona 2014; Jacewicz et al 2009). This speech rate effect was found to be strongest in the age estimates of older speakers
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