How children spontaneously describe talkers from speech

Adults infer information about speakers from their voices, including identities, states, and traits. Children are also sensitive to certain identity-related characteristics in speech, including individual talker identity, language spoken, gender, and L1 and L2 accents, but much less is known about how children link phonetic and socio-indexical information. In this study, rather than focusing on one socio-indexical dimension, we test 5- to 17-year-olds' person perception from speech and compare their responses with previously collected adult data. In a free descriptor task, children heard talkers produce sentences and described the person talking. Their responses were divided into single word or short phrase descriptors and placed into categories: psychological, stimulus, sexual orientation and gender identity, physical, social, and other. Children used a wide range of descriptors that fell into nearly every subcategory used by adults. However, compared to adults, children’s responses focused more on physical characteristics, including appearance and age, and less on psychological characteristics. Thus, children build representations of people from their voice, but focus less on psychological aspects of personality perhaps due to their emerging social and cognitive development, including theory of mind. [Work supported by National Science Foundation grant no. #SMA-2146474; Ohio State University Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences.]