Previous studies have shown that listeners are able to estimate the age of a speaker from the same language background with certain accuracy (Moyse, 2014). It is presumed that they rely on a set of acoustic cues, such as the fundamental frequency (F0; Schötz, 2007). Several studies have found an effect of speaker first language (L1) such that listeners are better at estimating the age of speakers in the same language or accent and there may be a consistent relationship between real and estimated age: for example, Japanese-accented speakers are perceived to be younger than English speakers (Bürkle & Gnevsheva, 2017). These results can be explained through existing differences in the F0 profiles between languages (e.g., Keating & Kuo, 2012). The current study investigates such sociophonetic variables and their effect on age estimation in accented speech by different L1 speakers.
20 Arabic, 20 Korean, and 20 Mandarin Chinese L1 listeners were presented with speech samples of 48 Arabic, Korean, and Mandarin L1 speakers reading the “Please call Stella” passage in English (Weinberger, 2015). Listeners were asked to estimate the speakers’ age, and listener demographic data were recorded in a post-experiment survey. The reaction time and accuracy of the listeners were recorded and regressed against linguistic and social variables (mean F0, F0 range, speech rate, speaker length of residence, etc.). The findings from this study will further our understanding of the relationship between sociophonetic variables and aging within a second-language context.
References
Bürkle, D., & Gnevsheva, K. (2017). Age estimation in foreign-accented speech. Paper presented at the International Conference on Language Variation in Europe. Malaga, Spain.
Keating, P., & Kuo, G. (2012). Comparison of speaking fundamental frequency in English and Mandarin. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132(2), 1050-1060.
Moyse, E. (2014). Age Estimation from Faces and Voices: A Review. Psychologica Belgica, 54(3), 255-265.
Schötz, S. (2007). Acoustic Analysis of Adult Speaker Age. In C. Müller (Ed.), Speaker Classification I: Fundamentals, Features, and Methods (pp. 88–107). Berlin: Springer.
