Human adults rely on both acoustic and linguistic information to identify adult talkers. Assuming favorable conditions, adult listeners recognize other adults fairly accurately and quickly. But how well can adult listeners recognize child talkers, whose speech productions often differ dramatically from adult speech productions? Although adult talker recognition has been heavily studied, only one study to date has directly compared the recognition of unfamiliar adult and child talkers [Creel and Jimenez (2012). J. Exp. Child Psychol. 113(4), 487–509]. Therefore, the current study revisits this question with a much larger and younger sample of child talkers (N = 20); performance with adult talkers (N = 20) was also tested to provide a baseline. In Experiment 1, adults successfully distinguished between adult talkers in an AX discrimination task but performed much worse with child talkers. In Experiment 2, adults were slower and less accurate at learning to identify child talkers than adult talkers in a training-identification task. Finally, in Experiment 3, adults failed to improve at identifying child talkers after three days of training with numerous child voices. Taken together, these findings reveal a sizable difference in adults' ability to recognize child versus adult talkers. Possible explanations and implications for understanding human talker recognition are discussed.

中文翻译：

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识别孩子的声音。

成年人依靠声音和语言信息来识别成年人说话者。假定条件良好，成年听众可以相当准确，迅速地识别其他成年人。但是，成年听众对儿童说话者的识别能力有多好呢？儿童说话者的发音通常与成年发音大不相同？尽管已经对成年说话者的识别进行了大量研究，但迄今为止，只有一项研究直接比较了不熟悉的成年说话者和儿童说话者的识别能力[Creel and Jimenez（2012）。J. Exp。儿童心理。113（4），487–509]。因此，当前的研究以更大，更年轻的儿童说话者样本（N = 20）重新审视了这个问题。与成人说话者表演（N= 20）也进行了测试以提供基准。在实验1中，成年人在AX歧视任务中成功地区分了成人说话者，但对儿童说话者的表现要差得多。在实验2中，在训练识别任务中，成年人在识别儿童说话者方面比在成人说话者上学习的速度慢且准确性较低。最后，在实验3中，经过为期三天的大量儿童声音训练后，成年人在识别儿童说话者方面没有改善。综上所述，这些发现揭示了成年人识别儿童说话者与成年人说话者能力的巨大差异。讨论了可能的解释和理解人类说话者识别的含义。