Listener estimates of talker age in a single-talker, 50-year longitudinal sample.
Eric J Hunter, Sarah Hargus Ferguson
PMID 28708986WHAT IT FOUND
Listeners judged a single talker's age from short speech excerpts.
They thought he sounded older when he was younger and younger when he was older. Listeners who recognized him were more accurate for his later decades.
Key findings
01Listeners overestimated the talker's age when he was younger and underestimated it when he was older.
02Listeners who recognized the talker estimated his age more accurately than listeners who did not recognize him for his 70s, 80s, and 90s.
03Listeners who did not recognize the talker gave broadly similar estimates for his 50s, 60s, and 70s, but estimates for his 80s and 90s differed from those earlier decades.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used one talker, so the pattern may not represent other people's voices. The talker gave public lectures, not conversational or clinical speech samples. The listeners were young adults with normal hearing, so their judgments may not match those of clinicians or older listeners. Familiarity was assessed only by a yes-or-no question after the task, so the degree of familiarity was not measured. The study did not test patients or voice disorders, so it cannot tell whether perceived age is useful in clinical assessment. The authors did not determine which acoustic features caused the age estimates.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that a patient's voice can be used to estimate their age or health. The study used one talker's public addresses and young adult listeners, and it did not test patients or show why the estimates were wrong.