A first study on age classification of costa rican speakers based on acoustic vowel analysis

Abstract

According to several studies, children’s speech is more dynamic and inconsistent compared to an adult’s speech. This aspect can be considered in the task of recognizing the age of the person who speaks and of great importance in many applications, such as humancomputer interaction, security on Internet and education assistants. Those applications have a dependency on language and accent, due to the different sounds and styles that characterize the speakers. This paper presents the initial results on the identification of Costa Rican children’s speech, in a database created for this purpose, consisting of words pronounced by adults and children of several ages. For this first study we chose the most common vowel of the language, and extract a set of common acoustic features to determine its applicability in distinguishing between adults and children of an age range. The outcome results shows promising results in the classification using a single vowel, that improves according to the number of vowels used to extract the acoustic features. This means that an automatic system could be able to improve its capacity to identify age as more speech information is received and transcribed, but cannot be very accurate in short interactions.