Age Estimation and Gender Attribution in Typically Developing Children and Children With Dysarthria

The purposes of this study were (a) to investigate adult listeners' perceptions of age and gender in typically developing children and children with dysarthria and (b) to identify predictors of their estimates among auditory-perceptual parameters and an acoustic measure of vocal pitch (F0). We aimed to evaluate the influence of dysarthria on the listeners' impressions of age and gender against the background of typical developmental processes.

In a listening experiment, adult listeners completed age and gender estimates of 144 typically developing children (3-9 years of age) and 25 children with dysarthria (5-9 years of age). The Bogenhausen Dysarthria Scales for Childhood Dysarthria (BoDyS-KiD) were applied to record speech samples and to complete auditory-perceptual judgments covering all speech subsystems. Furthermore, each child's mean F0 was determined from samples of four BoDyS-KiD sentences.

Age estimates for the typically developing children showed a regression to the mean, whereas children with dysarthria were systematically underestimated in their age. The estimates of all children were predicted by developmental speech features; for the children with dysarthria, specific dysarthria symptoms had an additional effect. We found a significantly higher accuracy of gender attribution in the typically developing children than in the children with dysarthria. The prediction accuracy of the listeners' gender attribution in the preadolescent children by the included speech characteristics was limited.

Children with dysarthria are more difficult to estimate for their age and gender than their typically developing peers. Dysarthria thus alters the auditory-perceptual impression of indexical speech features in children, which must be considered another facet of the communication disorder associated with childhood dysarthria.