Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to examine whether perceptual and acoustic characteristics of the voice are affected by the age of the speaker in order to understand why and how negative stereotypes of the aging population exist.

Method: In a previous study, narratives were collected from speakers aged 30 to 90 years. In order to investigate what perceptual properties of the voice indicate age, these narratives will be rated by a group of lay listeners. As a pilot study for this future experiment, two single listeners rated perceptual properties of the voice and estimated the age and sex of the speakers. Acoustic analyses, which are objective measures, were linked to the perceptual properties to determine the reliability of the more subjective perceptual ratings.

Results: The listeners were relatively accurate in estimating age using the voice alone. This suggests that there are perceptual cues in the voice that give away the speaker’s approximate age. In the older age ranges, certain qualities not present in younger voices were evident. In particular, speech rate was slower, and articulation was less precise. Some of the older speakers showed evidence of a tremor. In terms of acoustical analyses, measures of vocal variability (jitter and shimmer) were present in the oldest voices, which supports the perceptual differences between age groups that were noted by the listeners.

Conclusions: Listeners appear to be good judgers of age just by listening to an audio-sample of speech, suggesting that there are differences between young and old voices that can be perceived from acoustic cues of the voice. These perceptual ratings were related to certain objective acoustic measures. The results of this pilot study will help with the methods of the larger study by revealing problems and guiding the analyses associated with the implementation of the larger experiment.