Perception of voice gender in cochlear implant simulations of children's speech

Previous studies [Assmann et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 135, 2424 (2014) and Assmann et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 138, 1811 (2015)] investigated normal-hearing listeners’ ability to discriminate gender and age in children’s speech. The speech stimuli were /hVd/ syllables produced by 140 speakers, ages 5 through 18, and processed using the STRAIGHT vocoder to simulate a change in speaker gender. Experimental conditions involved swapping the fundamental frequency contour (F0) and/or the formant frequencies (FF) to the opposite-sex average within each age group. The present study extended these previous experiments by presenting the stimuli to normal-hearing listeners through a cochlear implant simulation implemented as a sine wave vocoder. Supporting findings reported at previous meetings, swapping F0 has a larger effect on perceived gender than swapping FF for older voices, and single-parameter changes (swapping either F0 or FF), had relatively small effects on older male voices but pronounced effects on olde...