Perception of speaker sex in children's voices
Peter F. Assmann, Terrance M. Nearey · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2011
To determine how accurately adult listeners can identify speaker sex in children's voices, we presented vowels in /hVd/ syllables produced in isolation and in a brief carrier sentence by five boys and five girls from each of four age groups (5–8, 9–12, 13–16, and 17–18 yr). Speaker sex identification improved with increasing age of the speaker, but even in the youngest group performance was significantly above chance. Strong biases were noted, with older boys more accurately classified than older girls, while the reverse pattern was found at younger ages. Listeners sometimes reported difficulty distinguishing the older girls from younger pre-adolescent boys. Recognition of speaker sex from isolated syllables was more accurate and listeners were more confident of their responses when informed of the age of the speaker. Performance was also higher when syllables were embedded in a carrier phrase, and in this condition the advantage provided by knowledge of the speaker's age was reduced. The results indicate that the perception of speaker sex can be informed by knowledge of the speaker's age, and that sentence context provides additional cues to speaker sex in children's speech.