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PurposeUsing naturalistic synthesized speech, we determined the relative importance of acoustic cues in voice gender and age perception in cochlear implant (CI) users.MethodWe investigated 28 CI users' abilities to utilize fundamental frequency (F0) and timbre in perceiving voice gender (Experiment 1) and vocal age (Experiment 2). Parameter-specific voice morphing was used to selectively control acoustic cues (F0; time; timbre, i.e., formant frequencies, spectral-level information, and aperiodicity, as defined in TANDEM-STRAIGHT) in voice stimuli. Individual differences in CI users' performance were quantified via deviations from the mean performance of 19 normal-hearing (NH) listeners.ResultsCI users' gender perception seemed exclusively based on F0, whereas NH listeners efficiently used timbre. For age perception, timbre was more informative than F0 for both groups, with minor contributions of temporal cues. While a few CI users performed comparable to NH listeners overall, others were at chance. Separate analyses confirmed that even high-performing CI users classified gender almost exclusively based on F0. While high performers could discriminate age in male and female voices, low performers were close to chance overall but used F0 as a misleading cue to age (classifying female voices as young and male voices as old). Satisfaction with CI generally correlated with performance in age perception.ConclusionsWe confirmed that CI users' gender classification is mainly based on F0. However, high performers could make reasonable usage of timbre cues in age perception. Overall, parameter-specific morphing can serve to objectively assess individual profiles of CI users' abilities to perceive nonverbal social-communicative vocal signals.

Purpose In their letter, Meister et al. (2020) appropriately point to a potential influence of stimulus type, arguing cochlear implant (CI) users may have the ability to use timbre cues only for complex stimuli such as sentences but not for brief stimuli such as vowel–consonant–vowel or single words. While we cannot exclude this possibility on the basis of Skuk et al. (2020) alone, we hold that there is a strong need to consider type of social signal (e.g., gender, age, emotion, speaker identity) to assess the profile of preserved and impaired aspects of voice processing in CI users. We discuss directions for further research to systematically consider interactive effects of stimulus type and social signal. In our view, this is crucial to understand and enhance nonverbal vocal perception skills that are relevant to successful communication with a CI.

Here we describe the Jena Speaker Set (JESS), a free database for unfamiliar adult voice stimuli, comprising voices from 61 young (18-25 years) and 59 old (60-81 years) female and male speakers uttering various sentences, syllables, read text, semi-spontaneous speech, and vowels. Listeners rated two voice samples (short sentences) per speaker for attractiveness, likeability, two measures of distinctiveness ("deviation"-based [DEV] and "voice in the crowd"-based [VITC]), regional accent, and age. Interrater reliability was high, with Cronbach's α between .82 and .99. Young voices were generally rated as more attractive than old voices, but particularly so when male listeners judged female voices. Moreover, young female voices were rated as more likeable than both young male and old female voices. Young voices were judged to be less distinctive than old voices according to the DEV measure, with no differences in the VITC measure. In age ratings, listeners almost perfectly discriminated young from old voices; additionally, young female voices were perceived as being younger than young male voices. Correlations between the rating dimensions above demonstrated (among other things) that DEV-based distinctiveness was strongly negatively correlated with rated attractiveness and likeability. By contrast, VITC-based distinctiveness was uncorrelated with rated attractiveness and likeability in young voices, although a moderate negative correlation was observed for old voices. Overall, the present results demonstrate systematic effects of vocal age and gender on impressions based on the voice and inform as to the selection of suitable voice stimuli for further research into voice perception, learning, and memory.

While the perception of sexual orientation in voices often relies on stereotypes, it is unclear whether speech stereotypes and accurate perceptions of sexual orientation are each based on acoustic cues common to speakers of a given group. We ask if the stereotypical belief, that members of the same sexual orientation group share similar acoustic patterns, is accurate to some degree. To address this issue, we are the first to use a novel voice morphing technique to create voice averages from voices that represent extremes of a given sexual orientation group either in terms of actual or perceived sexual orientation. Importantly, averaging preserves only those acoustic cues shared by the original speakers. 144 German listeners judged the sexual orientation of twelve natural-sounding sentence stimuli, each representing an average of five original utterances. Half of the averages were based on targets' self-ratings of sexual orientation: On a 7-point Kinsey-like scale, we selected targets who were most typical for a certain sexual orientation group according to their self-identifications. The other half were based on extreme ratings by others (i.e., on speech-related sexual-orientation stereotypes). Listeners judged sexual orientation from the voice averages with above-chance accuracy suggesting 1) that the perception of actual and stereotypical sexual orientation, respectively, are based on acoustic cues shared by speakers of the same group, and 2) that the stereotypical belief that members of the same sexual orientation group share similar acoustic patterns is accurate to some degree. Mean fundamental frequency and other common acoustic parameters showed systematic variation depending on speaker gender and sexual orientation. Effects of sexual orientation were more pronounced for stereotypical voice averages than for those based on speakers' self-ratings, suggesting that sexual-orientation stereotypes exaggerate even those differences present in the most salient groups of speakers. Implications of our findings for stereotyping and discrimination are discussed.

Voice morphing is a powerful tool for exploratory research and various applications. A temporally variable multi-aspect morphing is extended to enable morphing of arbitrarily many voices in a single step procedure. The proposed method is implemented based on interference-free representations of periodic signals and found to yield highly-naturally sounding manipulated voices which are useful for investigating human perception of voice. The formulation of the proposed method is general enough to be applicable to other representations and easily modified depending on application needs.

Purpose To determine the relative importance of acoustic parameters (fundamental frequency [F0], formant frequencies [FFs], aperiodicity, and spectrum level [SL]) on voice gender perception, the authors used a novel parameter-morphing approach that, unlike spectral envelope shifting, allows the application of nonuniform scale factors to transform formants and more direct comparison of parameter impact. Method In each of 2 experiments, 16 listeners with normal hearing (8 female, 8 male) classified voice gender for morphs between female and male speakers, using syllable tokens from 2 male–female speaker pairs. Morphs varied single acoustic parameters (Experiment 1) or selected combinations (Experiment 2), keeping residual parameters androgynous, as determined in a baseline experiment. Results The strongest cue related to gender perception was F0, followed by FF and SL. Aperiodicity did not systematically influence gender perception. Morphing F0 and FF in conjunction produced convincing changes in perceived gender—changes that were equivalent to those for Full morphs interpolating all parameters. Despite the importance of F0, morphing FF and SL in combination produced effective changes in voice gender perception. Conclusions The most important single parameters for gender perception are, in order, F0, FF, and SL. At the same time, F0 and vocal tract resonances have a comparable impact on voice gender perception. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.6170438

Aftereffects of adaptation have revealed both independent and interactive coding of facial signals including identity and expression or gender and age. By contrast, interactive processing of non-linguistic features in voices has rarely been investigated. Here we studied bidirectional cross-categorical aftereffects of adaptation to vocal age and gender. Prolonged exposure to young (~20yrs) or old (~70yrs) male or female voices biased perception of subsequent test voices away from the adapting age (Exp. 1) and the adapting gender (Exp. 2). Relative to gender-congruent adaptor-test pairings, vocal age aftereffects (VAAEs) were reduced but remained significant when voice gender changed between adaptation and test. This suggests that the VAAE relies on both gender-specific and gender-independent age representations for male and female voices. By contrast, voice gender aftereffects (VGAEs) were not modulated by age-congruency of adaptor and test voices (Exp. 2). Instead, young voice adaptors generally induced larger VGAEs than old voice adaptors. This suggests that young voices are particularly efficient gender adaptors, likely reflecting more pronounced sexual dimorphism in these voices. In sum, our findings demonstrate how high-level processing of vocal age and gender is partially intertwined.

The perception of emotions is often suggested to be multimodal in nature, and bimodal as compared to unimodal (auditory or visual) presentation of emotional stimuli can lead to superior emotion recognition. In previous studies, contrastive aftereffects in emotion perception caused by perceptual adaptation have been shown for faces and for auditory affective vocalization, when adaptors were of the same modality. By contrast, crossmodal aftereffects in the perception of emotional vocalizations have not been demonstrated yet. In three experiments we investigated the influence of emotional voice as well as dynamic facial video adaptors on the perception of emotion-ambiguous voices morphed on an angry-to-happy continuum. Contrastive aftereffects were found for unimodal (voice) adaptation conditions, in that test voices were perceived as happier after adaptation to angry voices, and vice versa. Bimodal (voice + dynamic face) adaptors tended to elicit larger contrastive aftereffects. Importantly, crossmodal (dynamic face) adaptors also elicited substantial aftereffects in male, but not in female participants. Our results (1) support the idea of contrastive processing of emotions (2), show for the first time crossmodal adaptation effects under certain conditions, consistent with the idea that emotion processing is multimodal in nature, and (3) suggest gender differences in the sensory integration of facial and vocal emotional stimuli.