Speaker Age Research Articles

The effect of speaker age on the perception of ironic insults.

We investigated a cue that readers may use in determining whether a remark such as "You are so helpful!" is intended as a compliment or as an ironic insult. The cue was the age of the speaker. Remarks were preceded by a sentence that either invited a literal or ironic interpretation of the remark. Data were collected on the familiarity of the remark as an ironic statement, and the incongruity of the remark with the prior context. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to rate the intent of the speaker as to how ironic, mocking, polite, and funny they intended their remark to be. In Experiment 2, participants read the scenarios as their eye movements were tracked. The results showed that age of the speaker had an impact on first pass reading times when statements were not familiar as ironic statements. Our younger adult participants did not appear to immediately activate a nonliteral interpretation of an ambiguous remark made by an older adult unless they had evidence from past experience that the remark is often used as an insult. However, ratings of the ironic intent of the statements were unaffected by speaker age; the age of the speaker affects the ease of interpretation but not the final outcome. The results are consistent with constraint-based theories of sentence comprehension. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Accuracy and confidence in estimation of speaker age

This article describes two experiments investigating listeners’ accuracy in estimation of speaker age as well as the listeners’ confidence that their estimates were correct. In Experiment 1, listeners made age estimates based on spontaneous speech. In Experiment 2, the estimates were based on read speech. The purpose of the study was to explore differences in accuracy and confidence depending on speech material, speaker characteristics (gender and age) and listener gender. Another purpose was to examine the realism in the listeners’ confidence ratings in estimations of spontaneous versus read speech. No differences in accuracy or confidence were found due to speech material type. Although accuracy was higher in estimates of male speakers, confidence was higher in estimates of female speakers, effects that were also dependent on speaker age. Possible acoustic and linguistic explanations behind the age and gender effects are discussed. As the correlation between confidence and accuracy was weak, it was concluded that confidence should not be relied on as an indicator of accuracy in estimation of speaker age.

Perceptual Asymmetries and Auditory Processing of Estonian Quantities.

Similar to visual perception, auditory perception also has a clearly described “pop-out” effect, where an element with some extra feature is easier to detect among elements without an extra feature. This phenomenon is better known as auditory perceptual asymmetry. We investigated such asymmetry between shorter or longer duration, and level or falling of pitch of linguistic stimuli that carry a meaning in one language (Estonian), but not in another (Russian). For the mismatch negativity (MMN) experiment, we created four different types of stimuli by modifying the duration of the first vowel [ɑ] (170, 290 ms) and pitch contour (level vs. falling pitch) of the stimuli words (‘SATA,’ ‘SAKI’). The stimuli were synthesized from Estonian words (‘SATA,’ ‘SAKI’) and follow the Estonian language three-way quantity system, which incorporates tonal features (falling pitch contour) together with temporal patterns. This made the meaning of the word dependent on the combination of both features and allows us to compare the relative contribution of duration and pitch contour in discrimination of language stimuli in the brain via MMN generation. The participants of the experiment were 12 Russian native speakers with little or no experience in Estonian and living in Estonia short-term, and 12 Estonian native speakers (age 18–27 years). We found that participants’ perception of the linguistic stimuli differed not only according to the physical features but also according to their native language, confirming that the meaning of the word interferes with the early automatic processing of phonological features. The GAMM and ANOVA analysis of the reversed design results showed that the deviant with longer duration among shorter standards elicited a MMN response with greater amplitude than the short deviant among long standards, while changes in pitch contour (falling vs. level pitch) produced neither strong MMN nor asymmetry. Thus, we demonstrate the effect of language background on asymmetric perception of linguistic stimuli that aligns with those of previous studies (Jaramillo et al., 2000), and contributes to the growing body of knowledge supporting auditory perceptual asymmetry.

Convolutional and Deep Neural Networks based techniques for extracting the age-relevant features of the speaker

With the advent of conversational voice recognition systems such as Alexa, SIRI, OK Google, etc., natural language conversational scheme including Chatbot and voice recognition systems are in new high and determining the age of a speaker is critical for setting the pertinent context. Age can be inferred from the speech signal by inferring various factors such as physical attributes of voice, linguistic attributes, frequency, speech rate, etc., This paper discusses on extracting the spectral features of speech such as Cepstral Coefficients, Spectral Decrease, Centroid, Flatness, Spectral Entropy,Jitter and Shimmer as inputs which would also helps in classifying speaker age through deep learning techniques.A novel approach is addressed along with the model for implementation using Deep Neural Network and Convolutional Neural Network for classifying the features using three different classifiers.The results obtained from the proposed system would outline the performance in speaker age recognition.

Pronoun, Personal Titles, and Variety of Java-Indonesian Language in Yowis Ben The Series Film: Contrastive Study

This study aimed to identify and to contrast differences in Javanese-Indonesian speech acts in the Yowis Ben The Series film. This study used a contrastive analysis study with a sociolinguistic approach, which in this context emphasizes the aspects of pronouns, personal titles, and language variations. The method used in this research was descriptive qualitative. The data in this study are speech acts in Javanese and Indonesian (translation) which are used as dialogues in the film. The data source in this study was taken from the Yowis Ben The Series film through the WeTV video streaming application. The results of this study indicated that there were differences usage of Javanese-Indonesian speech in aspects of pronouns, personal titles, and language variations. This difference was due to non-linguistic aspects, such as the speaker's background, age, position or degree of speech partners in society.
 Keywords: Speech Act, Contrastive Analysis, Sociolinguistic

The convolutional neural networks for Amazigh speech recognition system

In this paper, we present an approach based on convolutional neural networks to build an automatic speech recognition system for the Amazigh language. This system is built with TensorFlow and uses mel frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) to extract features. In order to test the effect of the speaker's gender and age on the accuracy of the model, the system was trained and tested on several datasets. The first experiment the dataset consists of 9240 audio files. The second experiment the dataset consists of 9240 audio files distributed between females and males’ speakers. The last experiment 3 the dataset consists of 13860 audio files distributed between age 9-15, age 16-30, and age 30+. The result shows that the model trained on a dataset of adult speaker’s age +30 categories generates the best accuracy with 93.9%.

Vocal fold kinematics and relative fundamental frequency as a function of obstruent type and speaker age.

The acoustic measure, relative fundamental frequency (RFF), has been proposed as an objective metric for assessing vocal hyperfunction; however, its underlying physiological mechanisms have not yet been fully characterized. This study aimed to characterize the relationship between RFF and vocal fold kinematics. Simultaneous acoustic and high-speed videoendoscopic (HSV) recordings were collected as younger and older speakers repeated the utterances /ifi/ and /iti/. RFF values at voicing offsets and onsets surrounding the obstruents were estimated from acoustic recordings, whereas glottal angles, durations of voicing offset and onset, and a kinematic estimate of laryngeal stiffness (KS) were obtained from HSV images. No differences were found between younger and older speakers for any measure. RFF did not differ between the two obstruents at voicing offset; however, fricatives necessitated larger glottal angles and longer durations to devoice. RFF values were lower and glottal angles were greater for stops relative to fricatives at voicing onset. KS values were greater in stops relative to fricatives. The less adducted vocal folds with greater KS and lower RFF at voicing onset for stops relative to fricatives in this study were in accordance with prior speculations that decreased vocal fold contact area and increased laryngeal stiffness may decrease RFF.

Age Estimation in Short Speech Utterances Based on Bidirectional Gated-Recurrent Neural Networks

Recently, age estimates from speech have received growing interest as they are important for ‎many applications like custom call routing, targeted marketing, or user-profiling. In this work, an ‎automatic system to estimate age in short speech utterances without ‎depending on the text is proposed. From each utterance frame, four ‎groups of features are extracted and then 10 statistical functionals are measured for each ‎extracted dimension of the features, to be followed by dimensionality reduction using Linear ‎Discriminant Analysis (LDA). Finally, bidirectional Gated-Recurrent Neural Networks (G-‎RNNs) are used to predict speaker age. Experiments are conducted on the VoxCeleb1 ‎dataset to show the performance of the proposed system, which is the first attempt to do so for ‎such a system. In gender-dependent system, the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of the proposed system ‎is 9.25 years, and 10.33 ‎years, the Root Mean ‎Square Error (RMSE)‎ is 13.17 and 13.26, respectively, ‎for ‎female and male speakers. In gender_ independent system, the MAE of the proposed system is 10.96 years, and the RMSE is 15.47. The results show that the proposed system has a good performance on short-duration utterances, taking into consideration the high noise ratio in the VoxCeleb1 dataset. ‎

The role of age and gender in grammatical variation in world Englishes

AbstractYoung speakers and women have been identified as leaders of language change in the English language. However, sociolinguistic studies addressing grammatical variation according to the age and gender of speakers are infrequent in world Englishes mainly due to the dearth of corpora with explicit detailed metadata. In this paper we explore the effect of these two factors on language innovation and creativity as represented in the International Corpus of English (ICE). For that purpose, we have selected two high‐frequency grammatical phenomena: (i) the expression of perfect meaning, which exhibits variability between different forms; and (ii) relative clauses, with variation in the use of relativizers. A preliminary analysis of the variable age shows that young speakers behave differently as regards both the expression of perfect meaning and the choice of relativizers. With this study we hope to contribute to this still small but growing body of sociolinguistic research on grammatical variation in world Englishes.

Age-based perceptions of a reversing regional sound change

Sound changes in progress can be examined in apparent time through differences in production across speaker age groups. Additionally, perceptions of sound changes in progress have been shown to be influenced by listener characteristics, including listener age, in ways that mirror production patterns. However, relatively little is known about the ways in which sound changes that have moved from advancing to reversing in production over time are perceived by community members. This paper examines how listeners of various ages within one U.S. community in Chicago produce and perceive vowels implicated in the region’s characteristic Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCS), which is undergoing reversal over time. Findings from a vowel categorization task show that significant age differences emerged in the opposite direction from those in production—younger participants show significantly more NCS-like perceptual boundaries than older speakers for just those features for which they are reversing the NCS in production. Results suggest that sociolinguistic perception is not simply a reflection of an individual’s static social position within a community, from which matched production and perceptual patterns are derived. Instead, a listener’s own positionality, experience and ideas about others in their community may condition their sociolinguistic expectations.

How are speech sound disorders perceived among children? A qualitative content analysis of focus group interviews with 10–11-year-old children

The aims of this study were to identify children’s reactions towards speech sound disorders (SSD) in other children and whether these reactions can be related to specific speech characteristics. Six audio samples, each containing minute-long resumes of short animated film by five children with SSDs and one child with typical speech (TS), aged 5–9 years, were played back to 17 10–11-year-olds, during four focus group interviews. The transcribed interviews underwent a qualitative content analysis. The analysis resulted in five identified main themes of listener reactions, concerning the experiences as a listener, the perspective of the speaker, as well as observations of speech characteristics. Reactions of empathy were expressed towards a perceived misalignment between speaker age and speech production proficiency. Awareness of peer reactions are clinically useful, for the understanding and acknowledgement of everyday contextual factors of children with SSDs, during planning and motivation of speech intervention. The children’s self-selected terminology may serve future quantitative investigations to further determine the boundaries of acceptability towards SSDs as well as towards non-standard sociolects or language varieties.

Speech aging: Production and perception.

In this overview we describe literature on how speech production and speech perception change in healthy or normal aging across the adult lifespan. In the production section we review acoustic characteristics that have been investigated as potentially distinguishing younger and older adults. In the speech perception section studies concerning speaker age estimation and those investigating older listeners' perception are addressed. Our discussion focuses on major themes and other fruitful areas for future research. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language in Mind and Brain Linguistics > Linguistic Theory Psychology > Development and Aging.

A review on speaker recognition: Technology and challenges

Voice is a behavioral biometric that conveys information related to a person's traits, such as the speaker's ethnicity, age, gender, and feeling. Speaker recognition deals with recognizing the identity of people based on their voice. Although researchers have been working on speaker recognition in the last eight decades, advancements in technology, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), smart devices, voice assistants, smart homes, and humanoids, have made its usage nowadays trendy. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the literature on speaker recognition. It discusses the advances made in the last decade, including the challenges in this area of research. This paper also highlights the system and structure of speaker recognition as well as its feature extraction and classifiers. The use of speaker recognition in applications is also presented. As recent studies showed the possibility of fooling machine learning into giving an incorrect prediction; thus, the adversarial attack is also discussed. The aim is to enhance researchers’ understanding in the area of speaker recognition.

Supplemental Material for The Effect of Speaker Age on the Perception of Ironic Insults

Supplemental Material for The Effect of Speaker Age on the Perception of Ironic Insults

Языковая ситуация среди населения с биэтничной русско-украинской идентичностью на юге Западной Сибири

The analysis of the linguistic situation in the self-consciousness of the population with bi-ethnic Russian-Ukrainian identity in the south of Western Siberia is presented. The mixed Russian-Ukrainian language (“khokhlyatskiy” or surzhik), formed in places of concentration of the Ukrainian population, and the peculiarities of its existence are analyzed. Based on the data obtained during in-depth interviews in the summer of 2020, sociolinguistic factors affecting the linguistic situation in the region are described: the size of the ethnic group, the age of native speakers, the ethnic nature of marriages and the type of family education, language teaching at school. The level of proficiency in the Ukrainian language and surzhik depends on the period of resettlement, place of residence and age of the respondents. The author comes to the conclusion that the Ukrainian or “Khokhlyatskiy” language in the south of Western Siberia is assigned a more symbolic role in defining ethnic identity.

Stereotyping in the digital age: Male language is "ingenious", female language is "beautiful" - and popular.

The huge power for social influence of digital media may come with the risk of intensifying common societal biases, such as gender and age stereotypes. Speaker's gender and age also behaviorally manifest in language use, and language may be a powerful tool to shape impact. The present study took the example of TED, a highly successful knowledge dissemination platform, to study online influence. Our goal was to investigate how gender- and age-linked language styles-beyond chronological age and identified gender-link to talk impact and whether this reflects gender and age stereotypes. In a pre-registered study, we collected transcripts of TED Talks along with their impact measures, i.e., views and ratios of positive and negative talk ratings, from the TED website. We scored TED Speakers' (N = 1,095) language with gender- and age-morphed language metrics to obtain measures of female versus male, and younger versus more senior language styles. Contrary to our expectations and to the literature on gender stereotypes, more female language was linked to higher impact in terms of quantity, i.e., more talk views, and this was particularly the case among talks with a lot of views. Regarding quality of impact, language signatures of gender and age predicted different types of positive and negative ratings above and beyond main effects of speaker's gender and age. The differences in ratings seem to reflect common stereotype contents of warmth (e.g., "beautiful" for female, "courageous" for female and senior language) versus competence (e.g., "ingenious", "informative" for male language). The results shed light on how verbal behavior may contribute to stereotypical evaluations. They also illuminate how, within new digital social contexts, female language might be uniquely rewarded and, thereby, an underappreciated but highly effective tool for social influence. WC = 286 (max. 300 words).

A NOVEL SPEECH RECOGNITION SYSTEM USING FUZZY NEURAL NETWORK

An important field in digital speech processing is human voice. Speech recognition in humans has long been a hot topic in signal processing and artificial intelligence research. Natural Language Processing (NLP) offers an interdisciplinary subfield called speech recognition that makes it easier for machines to recognize spoken language and transform it into text. To communicate with machines, speech recognition machines has the potential to be helpful. Technology that can have communicates in real time has been made possible. However, there remain additional issues, such as speaker variance due to other factors like age, gender, signal speed, pronunciation variations, noise from the surrounding area etc. Classification of age and gender is important for speech processing. A lot of work has been done to enhance each of these phases in order to get better and more accurate results. The main goal of this analysis is on the integration of machine learning into the speech recognition system. Hence, this analysis presents a novel speech recognition system using Fuzzy neural network. Pre-processing, speech signal segmentation, speech feature extraction, and speaker recognition are the different phases of a speech recognition system. It uses a fuzzy neural network to identify the speaker's age and gender. Accuracy, F1-score, and Precision are used to evaluate the fuzzy model's performance.

Speech acts addressed to Hadza infants in Tanzania: Cross-cultural comparison, speaker age, and camp livelihood

This study deals with speech acts addressed to Hadza infants in Tanzania, a group that has traditionally lived off hunting and gathering. Three research questions are addressed: How do Hadza speech acts compare with those found in previous studies in other cultures? Are there differences between child and adult speakers? And do speech acts differ with camp livelihood patterns? Speech acts are seen as a part of language socialization, which reflects overarching cultural values and socialization goals. The results indicate that Hadza infants experience many requests for action/imperatives—a way of expressing hierarchies—more than the infants in the comparative cultural communities, in spite of the fact that hunter–gatherers have been described as egalitarian in the past. Children’s and adults’ speech acts differ in several ways: adults use more requests for action and information (questions) with infants, while children use more assertives. Finally, the comparison of camp livelihoods revealed differences mainly between camps living off tourism and those that are more isolated from outside influence. The former use more imperatives, the latter more vocatives. The results are discussed in terms of cultural change toward more hierarchical structure related to livelihood activities, particularly tourism, and different activities that children and adults engage in when interacting with infants.

Formant Frequencies of Adult Speakers of Australian English and Effects of Sex, Age, Geographical Location, and Vowel Quality

The primary aim of this study was to provide normative formant frequency (F) values for male and female speakers of Australian English. The secondary aim was to examine the effects of speaker sex, age, vowel quality, and geographical location on F. The first three monophthong formant frequencies (F1, F2, and F3) for 244 female and 135 male speakers aged 18-60 years from a recent large-scale corpus of Australian English were analysed on a passage reading task. Mixed effects linear regression models suggested that speaker sex, speaker age, and vowel quality significantly predicted F1, F2, and F3 (P=0.000). Effect sizes suggested that speaker sex and vowel quality contributed most to the variations in F1, F2, and F3 whereas speaker age and geographical location contributed a smaller amount. Both clinicians and researchers are provided with normative F data for 18-60 year-old speakers of Australian English. Such data have increased internal and external validity relative to previous literature. F normative data for speakers of Australian English should be considered with reference to speaker sex and vowel but it may not be practically necessary to adjust for speaker age and geographical location.

Perceptual Voice Qualities Database (PVQD): Database Characteristics

To develop a perceptual voice quality database for educational and research purposes. Development of a database. A total of 296 high quality audio file recordings consisting of sustained /a/ and /i/ vowels and sentences from Consensus Auditory-Perceptual Evaluation of Voice were made in clinical environments. Nineteen experienced voice clinicians rated the audio samples using voice qualities from the Consensus Auditory-Perceptual Evaluation of Voice (without visual anchors) and GRBAS scales. The database includes samples of a wide range of voice quality severities across a wide range of speaker age and sex. Both inter- and intrarater reliabilities were established to be good for the database overall. The database is housed in the Mendeley Data online repository and is free for public use.