Stimulus Duration and Type in Perception o

In a small perception study, our ability to estimate speaker age from speech samples was investigated with respect to stimu-lus duration, stimulus type and speaker gender. Four sepa-rate listening tests were carried out with four different sets of stimuli: 10 and 3 seconds of spontaneous speech, one isolated word, and 6 concatenated isolated words, all produced by the same 24 speakers. The results showed that the listeners ’ judge-ments were about twice as accurate compared to a baseline es-timator, and that both stimulus duration and type affected the judgements. It was also found that stimulus duration influenced the listeners judgements of female speakers somewhat more, while stimulus type affected the age judgments of male speak-ers more, indicating that listeners may use different strategies when judging female and male speaker age. 1