The Effect of Temporal Speech Alterations on Speaker Race and Sex Identifications

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Abstract
The purpose of this investigation was to determine the importance of temporal features of speech in speaker race and sex identifications. A total of 20 speakers, 10 white (five females and five males) and 10 black (five females and five males) recorded four sentences. Three master tapes were constructed from these recordings, representing the three experimental conditions in the study: forward-played, backward-played, and time-compressed. The master tapes were played to a group of 30 judges who participated in three sessions, one for each of the three experimental conditions. In each session they were asked to judge the race and sex of the speaker of each sentence as well as the confidence of each decision on a seven-point rating scale. Results of their judgments indicate the following: (1) temporal alteration of the speech signal by means of backward-playing and time-compression adversely affected race identifications but not sex identifications; (2) listener accuracy and confidence for sex judgments were considerably greater than for race judgments on each of the three master tapes; (3) for each of the three experimental conditions, listener accuracy for race and sex identifications was better than that expected by chance guessing. Implications of these and other findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.

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