PurposeUsing naturalistic synthesized speech, we determined the relative importance of acoustic cues in voice gender and age perception in cochlear implant (CI) users.MethodWe investigated 28 CI users' abilities to utilize fundamental frequency (F0) and timbre in perceiving voice gender (Experiment 1) and vocal age (Experiment 2). Parameter-specific voice morphing was used to selectively control acoustic cues (F0; time; timbre, i.e., formant frequencies, spectral-level information, and aperiodicity, as defined in TANDEM-STRAIGHT) in voice stimuli. Individual differences in CI users' performance were quantified via deviations from the mean performance of 19 normal-hearing (NH) listeners.ResultsCI users' gender perception seemed exclusively based on F0, whereas NH listeners efficiently used timbre. For age perception, timbre was more informative than F0 for both groups, with minor contributions of temporal cues. While a few CI users performed comparable to NH listeners overall, others were at chance. Separate analyses confirmed that even high-performing CI users classified gender almost exclusively based on F0. While high performers could discriminate age in male and female voices, low performers were close to chance overall but used F0 as a misleading cue to age (classifying female voices as young and male voices as old). Satisfaction with CI generally correlated with performance in age perception.ConclusionsWe confirmed that CI users' gender classification is mainly based on F0. However, high performers could make reasonable usage of timbre cues in age perception. Overall, parameter-specific morphing can serve to objectively assess individual profiles of CI users' abilities to perceive nonverbal social-communicative vocal signals.

中文翻译：

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参数特定的变形揭示了音色和基频线索对人工耳蜗用户声音性别和年龄感知的贡献

目的使用自然合成语音，我们确定了人工耳蜗 (CI) 用户声音性别和年龄感知中声学线索的相对重要性。方法我们调查了 28 位 CI 用户利用基频 (F0) 和音色感知声音性别（实验 1）和声音年龄（实验 2）的能力。参数特定的语音变形用于选择性地控制语音刺激中的声学线索（F0；时间；音色，即共振峰频率、频谱级信息和非周期性，如 TANDEM-STRAIGHT 中所定义）。CI 用户表现的个体差异是通过与 19 名正常听力 (NH) 听众的平均表现的偏差来量化的。结果CI 用户的性别感知似乎完全基于 F0，而 NH 听众则有效地使用音色。对于年龄感知，两组的音色都比 F0 提供更多信息，时间线索的贡献较小。虽然少数 CI 用户的总体表现与 NH 听众相当，但其他人则只是碰运气。单独的分析证实，即使是表现出色的 CI 用户也几乎完全根据 F0 来分类性别。虽然高绩效者可以区分男性和女性声音的年龄，但低绩效者总体上接近偶然，但使用 F0 作为年龄的误导性线索（将女性声音分类为年轻，将男性声音分类为老年）。对 CI 的满意度通常与年龄感知的表现相关。结论我们确认CI用户的性别分类主要基于F0。然而，高绩效者可以合理利用年龄感知中的音色线索。总体而言，特定于参数的变形可以客观地评估 CI 用户感知非语言社交交流声音信号的能力的个人概况。