# Listeners are biased towards voices of young speakers and female speakers when discriminating voices

## TL;DR

People are better at recognizing voices of young and female speakers, which could impact forensic voice identification.

## Contribution

This study reveals a bias in voice discrimination towards young and female speakers, independent of age or sex of the listener.

## Key findings

- Younger listeners showed higher sensitivity in voice discrimination than older listeners.
- Listeners were more sensitive to male voices than female voices.
- Listeners had a stronger 'same' bias for young and female speakers.

## Abstract

In face processing, an own-age recognition advantage has frequently been reported whereby observers are better at recognizing faces of their own compared to other age groups. We wanted to know whether own-age effects exist in voice recognition. Two listener groups, younger adults (n = 42, 19–35 years, 21 males) and older adults (n = 32, 65–83 years, 14 males), completed a speaker discrimination task (same/different speakers), which included younger and older adult speakers of both sexes. Results revealed no interaction of the factors speaker and listener age and speaker and listener sex on listeners’ sensitivity (d′). Main effects were significant for listener age (young adult listeners exhibited higher sensitivity than the older adult listeners) and speaker sex (listeners’ sensitivity was higher for male compared to female voices). Crucially, response bias (c) revealed that listeners had a significantly higher ‘same’ bias when hearing younger speakers and female speakers. Our findings have implications for theories of voice identity processing and forensic contexts requiring discrimination of speakers’ identity, e.g. earwitnesses telling apart younger and female speakers.