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http://dx.doi.org/10.13064/KSSS.2019.11.4.009

Speaker age estimation and acoustic characteristics: According to pitch and speech rate  

Seo, YoonJeong (Department of Korean Language and Literatures, Korea University)
Shin, Jiyoung (Department of Korean Language and Literatures, Korea University)
Publication Information
Phonetics and Speech Sciences / v.11, no.4, 2019 , pp. 9-18 More about this Journal
Abstract
This study aimed to investigate the correlation between speaker's chronological age (CA) and perceived age (PA) and to specify the effect of pitch and speech rate as acoustic cue on judging age, using perceptual testing and acoustic analysis. Three tasks were conducted to identify the degree of listener's accuracy about age estimation. Three perception tasks were conducted to measure the accuracy of 80 Korean listeners when presented with different types of speech. In all the tasks, participants listened to speech samples and gave their estimate of the speaker's age in figures. It was found that Korean listeners are able to gauge the age of a speaker fairly precisely. CA and mean PA were positively correlated in all three tasks. It is clear that the amount and type of information included in the voice samples affected the accuracy of a listener's judgement. Moreover, the result revealed that listeners make use of acoustic information such as pitch and speech rate to estimate speaker's age.
Keywords
age estimation; perception test; pitch; speech rate;
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Times Cited By KSCI : 3  (Citation Analysis)
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