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Perception of voice gender in cochlear implant simulations of children's speech
Abstract   Peer reviewed

Perception of voice gender in cochlear implant simulations of children's speech

Daniel R. Guest, Michelle R. Kapolowicz, Shaikat Hossain, Vahid Montazeri and Peter F. Assmann
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol.139(4 Suppl), pp.2124-2124
04/2016
DOI: 10.1121/1.4950328

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Abstract

Previous studies [Assmann et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 135, 2424 (2014) and Assmann et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 138, 1811 (2015)] investigated normal-hearing listeners’ ability to discriminate gender and age in children’s speech. The speech stimuli were /hVd/ syllables produced by 140 speakers, ages 5 through 18, and processed using the STRAIGHT vocoder to simulate a change in speaker gender. Experimental conditions involved swapping the fundamental frequency contour (F0) and/or the formant frequencies (FF) to the opposite-sex average within each age group. The present study extended these previous experiments by presenting the stimuli to normal-hearing listeners through a cochlear implant simulation implemented as a sine wave vocoder. Supporting findings reported at previous meetings, swapping F0 has a larger effect on perceived gender than swapping FF for older voices, and single-parameter changes (swapping either F0 or FF), had relatively small effects on older male voices but pronounced effects on older female voices. Overall, the present findings indicate that gender recognition is more difficult in a cochlear implant simulation. Furthermore, gender recognition in a cochlear implant simulation is particularly difficult with ambiguous voices, such as those of young children.

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