The perceptual identity and characteristics of aging in normal male adult speakers.

Twenty untrained male and 20 untrained female listeners were requested to judge the age of 46 male speakers from samples of conversational speech. Thirty-seven samples were judged similarly by the two groups and were therefore provided as listening stimuli for ten male and ten female speech pathologists. Through an a posteriori schema, speech pathologists were required to specify the salient features of speech judged as being characteristic of each speaker's perceived age. The results of the study indicated that untrained listeners used similar perceptual sets to judge age until after the fiftieh year of life. Regardless of sex, listeners tended to underestimate the age of the speakers. Male and female speech pathologists viewed low pitch and hoarseness as being the most salient features of speech for the speakers. Qualitative analysis revealed that the most prominent features indicated by speech pathologists could be classified according to pitch, quality, articulation, and rate of speech.