THE SPEAKER’S AGE: A PERCEPTUAL STUDY

The results of this experimental research on Italian language show that it is possible to infer a speaker’s age on a perceptual basis with good approximation. The corpus consisted of a sentence taken from a newspaper, read by 23 Italian male speakers belonging to six different age ranges. All speakers and listeners were from the same regional area. Only in the last phase, a spontaneous speech produced by a speaker from a different regional area was considered. The procedure involves a series of comparative tests where the unknown voice is compared to voices belonging to different age ranges. Then, on the basis of the answers, listeners are asked to indicate the age of the unknown voice in a reduced interval. The procedure has been tested on two voices of different age. Furthermore the study shows that young listeners give the best results and neither different kinds of speech (spontaneous/read) nor the variety of regional Italian have any relevant influence on the identification of age. Such a procedure could be useful for several applications, as for instance the identification of the speaker’s age in a forensic field and the protection of the children in web navigation.