Perceptual and acoustic analysis of voice similarities between parents and young children

Human voice provides the means for verbal communication and forms a part of personal identity. Due to genetic and environmental factors, a voice of a child should resemble the voice of her parent(s), but voice similarities between parents and young children are underresearched. Read-aloud speech of Finnish-speaking and Russian-speaking parent-child pairs was subject to perceptual and multi-step instrumental and statistical analysis. Finnish-speaking listeners could not discriminate family pairs auditorily in an XAB paradigm, but the Russian-speaking listeners’ mean accuracy of answers reached 72.5%. On average, in both language groups family-internal f0 similarities were stronger than family-external, with parents showing greater family-internal similarities than children. Auditory similarities did not reflect acoustic similarities in a straightforward way.