Perception of speaker sex, age, and vocal effort
Hartmut Traunmüller · 1997
Speech material recorded for the purpose of studying the acoustic properties of speech as a function of speaker sex, age, and vocal effort (induced by varying the distance between speaker and listener over a wide range) was used in perception experiments in which the subjects had to rate either the distance between speaker and listener or the age and the sex of the speaker. The correlations between these percepts and gross spectral and temporal properties of the utterances, such as the mean values of F 0 , F 1 , and F 3 , spectral emphasis and utterance duration were analysed. Introduction It is well known that the acoustic properties of speech sounds vary not only because of linguistic factors, but also as a function of organic, expressive, and transmittal factors (Traunmüller, 1997), but there are few studies concerned with the perception of these paralinguistic qualities. The present contribution concerns the perception of some of the most prominent variables in organic quality, s...