The effect of speech rate on age estimation in conversational speech

Abstract

Previous studies found that older speakers generally speak slower than younger speakers and further showed that listeners make use of this age-rate correlation in estimating speakers’ age. This study examines how speakers’ speech rates affect the perception of speaker age in conversational speech as well as how listeners’ own age affects age perception. After hearing a short dialogue in which two speakers’ speech rates were varied orthogonally, listeners estimated the age of each speaker. The results showed that listeners judged slower voices as older than faster voices and this effect was more pronounced for older speakers. We found no effect of interlocutors’ speech rate, indicating that the listeners were able to reliably separate the speech rate information of the two speakers in the dialogue. We also found a significant effect of listeners’ own age; other things being equal, younger listeners judged the speakers to be younger than older listeners.