Developmental changes in the capacity to discriminate unfamiliar voices
Virginia A. Mann, Rhea Diamond, Susan E. Carey · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1978
Forced-choice discrimination of unfamiliar adult female voices has been examined in children age six to sixteen and in adults. Performance changed markedly with age, improving sharply between ages six and ten, with ten-year-olds approaching adult levels. After age ten accuracy declined significantly but returned to the adult level by age fourteen. These observations are not consistent with a previous suggestion that only a minimal change in voice recognition capacity occurs after age four [B. Bartholomeus, Canad. J. Psych. 27, 464–472 (1963)]. However, Bartholomeus' suggestion was based on observations of children's capacity to identify familiar voices. Apparently, tasks which require encoding of unfamiliar voices produce a developmental pattern distinct from that found in tasks requiring recognition of voices already represented in memory. This distinction parallels one recently documented between development of the ability to encode and recognize unfamiliar faces and development of the ability to recognize familiar ones [R. Diamond and S. Carey, J. Exp. Child Psychol. 23, 1–22 (1977)]. [Work supported by NSF, NIH, and the Spencer Foundation.]