Age estimation in foreign-accented speech by non-native speakers of English

Publication date: Available online 20 December 2018Source: Speech CommunicationAuthor(s): Dan Jiao, Vicky Watson, Sidney Gig-Jan Wong, Ksenia Gnevsheva, Jessie S. NixonAbstractListeners are able to very approximately estimate speakers’ ages, with a mean estimation error of around ten years. Interestingly, accuracy varies considerably, depending on a number of social aspects of both speaker and listener, including age, gender and native language or language variety. The present study considers the effects of four factors on age perception. It investigates whether there is a main effect of speakers’ native language (Arabic, Korean and Mandarin) even when speaking a second language, English. It also investigates a particular speaker-listener relationship, namely the degree of linguistic familiarity. Linguistic familiarity was expected to be greater between Mandarin and Korean than between Mandarin or Korean and Arabic. In addition, it considers the effect of the acoustic cues of mean fundamental frequency (F0) and speech rate on age estimates. Fifteen Arabic-accented, fifteen Korean-accented and twenty Mandarin-accented English speakers participated as listeners. They heard audio stimuli produced by forty-eight speakers, equally distributed between native Arabic, Korean and Mandarin speakers, reading a short passage in English. Listeners were instructed to estimate speakers’ ages in years. Listeners’ age estimates and reaction times were recorded. Results indicate a sign...
Source: Speech Communication - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research