Speech Science Forum - Valeriia Perepelytsia (University of Zurich)

Abstract:

Channel quality has an effect on voice recognition. For example, it is well documented that voice recognition over the telephone is worse compared to high-quality studio recordings. However, it is unclear whether voice recognition over widely used high compression audio channels such as Zoom, MS Teams, or WhatsApp is affected. In addition, voice perception abilities of older adults received comparatively less attention than those of younger adults.

In my talk, I will present two voice perception experiments. The first experiment focuses on the effect of channel quality on voice recognition performance in young adults. In this experiment, three groups of listeners learned voices over three different channels (i.e., studio recordings, Zoom, and telephone audio) and did a voice recognition test consisting of stimuli from all three channels. We found that both voice learning and voice recognition with Zoom audio are comparable to studio-quality audio. In the second study, we investigated the own-age bias in voice discrimination. To this end, two groups of listeners (young adults and older adults) did a voice discrimination test containing stimuli from young and older voices. The preliminary results suggest the presence of own-age effect in young adults, but not in older adults: young listeners better discriminated young voices compared to elderly voices, whereas older adults did not show an own-age advantage.