Listeners are biased towards voices of young speakers and female speakers when discriminating voices
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In face processing, an own-age recognition advantage has frequently been reported whereby observers are better at recognizing faces of their own compared to other age groups. We wanted to know whether own-age effects exist in voice recognition. Two listener groups, younger adults (n = 42, 19-35 years, 21 males) and older adults (n = 32, 65-83 years, 14 males), completed a speaker discrimination task (same/different speakers), which included younger and older adult speakers of both sexes. Results revealed no interaction of the factors speaker and listener age and speaker and listener sex on listeners' sensitivity (d'). Main effects were significant for listener age (young adult listeners exhibited higher sensitivity than the older adult listeners) and speaker sex (listeners' sensitivity was higher for male compared to female voices). Crucially, response bias (c) revealed that listeners had a significantly higher 'same' bias when hearing younger speakers and female speakers. Our findings have implications for theories of voice identity processing and forensic contexts requiring discrimination of speakers' identity, e.g. earwitnesses telling apart younger and female speakers.
Institutions: University of Zurich, Bern University of Applied Sciences
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,990
Awards: The dynamics of indexical information in speech and its role in speech communication and speaker recognition, Mechanisms of superior face recognition, Novel ways of preventing age-related cognitive decline: Identifying the role of speech processing deficits in Alzheimer’s disease, Evolution of phonetics and phonology (EVOPHON)
OpenAlex ID: W4411114235