Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous research has shown that voices of unfamiliar young children are more difficult to differentiate and identify than the voices of adults. In the present study, we examine whether difficulty identifying child voices extends to cases in which those voices are highly familiar. Caregivers (n = 132) of 3.5- to 10-year-old children were presented with voice recordings of their own child amongst gender- and age-matched peers and asked to identify which voice belonged to their child. Although overall accuracy was high, voices of younger children were misidentified more often than voices of older children. In contrast with existing models of familiar voice identification, results suggest that listeners are sensitive to variability in low-level acoustic cues to speaker identity in familiar as well as unfamiliar voice processing.