Sample Recording of Spontaneous Speech for Age-Related Changes to Spectral Voice Characteristics (Dilley et al., 2013)

Purpose As children mature, changes in voice spectral characteristics co-vary with changes in speech, language, and behavior. In this study, spectral characteristics were manipulated to alter the perceived ages of talkers' voices while leaving critical acoustic–prosodic correlates intact, to determine whether perceived age differences were associated with differences in judgments of prosodic, segmental, and talker attributes.

Method Speech was modified by lowering formants and fundamental frequency, for 5-year-old children's utterances, or raising them, for adult caregivers' utterances. Next, participants differing in awareness of the manipulation (Experiment 1A) or amount of speech-language training (Experiment 1B) made judgments of prosodic, segmental, and talker attributes. Experiment 2 investigated the effects of spectral modification on intelligibility. Finally, in Experiment 3, trained analysts used formal prosody coding to assess prosodic characteristics of spectrally modified and unmodified speech.

Results Differences in perceived age were associated with differences in ratings of speech rate, fluency, intelligibility, likeability, anxiety, cognitive impairment, and speech-language disorder/delay; effects of training and awareness of the manipulation on ratings were limited. There were no significant effects of the manipulation on intelligibility or formally coded prosody judgments.

Conclusion Age-related voice characteristics can greatly affect judgments of speech and talker characteristics, raising cautionary notes for developmental research and clinical work.

目的：随着儿童的成长，语音频谱特征的改变与语音、语言和行为的变化呈共变关系。在本研究中，通过对频谱特征的操控以改变说话者声音的感知年龄，同时保留关键的声学-韵律相关特征，旨在确定感知年龄差异是否与韵律、音节和说话者属性的判断差异相关。
方法：通过降低元音和基频来修改5岁儿童的语音，或提高它们来修改成年护理者的语音。接着，参与者根据对操控的感知程度（实验1A）或言语语言训练量（实验1B）的不同，对韵律、音节和说话者属性进行判断。实验2调查了频谱修改对可理解性的影响。最后，在实验3中，经过训练的分析员使用正式的韵律编码来评估频谱修改和未修改的语音的韵律特征。
结果：感知年龄的差异与对语音速率、流畅度、可理解性、喜好度、焦虑、认知障碍和言语语言障碍/延迟的评分差异相关；训练和操控感知对评分的影响有限。操控对可理解性或正式编码的韵律判断没有显著影响。
结论：与年龄相关的语音特征可以极大地影响对语音和说话者特征的判断，为发育研究及临床工作提出了警示。