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.
This study was performed to investigate acoustic characteristics of sustained vowels produced by Seoul Korean speakers. For this study, three hundred nine healthy adults were chosen as participants from Korean Standard Speech Database. These subjects were divided into five chronological age groups (20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60-70s) and two gender groups (male and female). Fundamental frequency (f0), jitter, shimmer, and NHR (noise-to-harmonics ratio) was measured with 8 Korean vowels (/ɑ/, /ae/, /ʌ/, /e/, /o/, /u/, /ɯ/, /i/) by using Praat. The results showed that the vowel type significantly affected all acoustic parameters. Gender affected f0, jitter, and NHR significantly. The mean female speakers' f0 was greater than the males', and the mean jitter and NHR of male speakers was greater than the females'. Moreover, age affected shimmer and NHR significantly; in particular, the shimmer and NHR of elderly speakers was greater than the young speakers.
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