Listener judgments of age in a single-talker 48-year longitudinal sample

Numerous studies have demonstrated that listeners can make relatively accurate judgments of a talker’s age from hearing the talker’s voice. Materials in these previous studies have included sustained vowels (phonated and sometimes whispered), sentences, and passages of discourse. The number of talkers has ranged from 4 to 150, but in nearly all cases talkers were recorded only once. In the present study, the materials were recorded from a single talker who gave regular public speeches over a period of 48 years. Young adult listeners performed age judgments on samples extracted from 20 speeches chosen at 2–3 year intervals spanning the 48-year period, three samples per speech. Samples lasted 5 to 10 s and were chosen to minimize content that would identify the talker or link samples from the same speech to each other. In separate experiments, listeners listened to these 60 samples and after each one judged the talker’s age either by choosing from three categories (50–66, 67–83, or 94–100 years) or by making a direct age estimate. Accuracy of these estimates will be compared to previous studies and examined as a function of both the talker’s chronological age and acoustic measures performed for this talker in a separate experiment.