544 research outputs found

    Do red deer stags (Cervus elaphus) use roar fundamental frequency (F0) to assess rivals?

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    It is well established that in humans, male voices are disproportionately lower pitched than female voices, and recent studies suggest that this dimorphism in fundamental frequency (F0) results from both intrasexual (male competition) and intersexual (female mate choice) selection for lower pitched voices in men. However, comparative investigations indicate that sexual dimorphism in F0 is not universal in terrestrial mammals. In the highly polygynous and sexually dimorphic Scottish red deer Cervus elaphus scoticus, more successful males give sexually-selected calls (roars) with higher minimum F0s, suggesting that high, rather than low F0s advertise quality in this subspecies. While playback experiments demonstrated that oestrous females prefer higher pitched roars, the potential role of roar F0 in male competition remains untested. Here we examined the response of rutting red deer stags to playbacks of re-synthesized male roars with different median F0s. Our results show that stags’ responses (latencies and durations of attention, vocal and approach responses) were not affected by the F0 of the roar. This suggests that intrasexual selection is unlikely to strongly influence the evolution of roar F0 in Scottish red deer stags, and illustrates how the F0 of terrestrial mammal vocal sexual signals may be subject to different selection pressures across species. Further investigations on species characterized by different F0 profiles are needed to provide a comparative background for evolutionary interpretations of sex differences in mammalian vocalizations

    Using Active Shape Modeling Based on MRI to Study Morphologic and Pitch-Related Functional Changes Affecting Vocal Structures and the Airway

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    Copyright © 2013 The Voice Foundation. Published by Mosby, Inc. All rights reserved.Peer reviewedPostprin

    Acoustic and electroglottographic (EGG) characteristics of tracheoesophageal speech of Cantonese

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    This study investigated the acoustic and electroglottographic (EGG) characteristics of tracheoesophageal (TE) speech of Cantonese. Seven TE speakers and seven aged-matched laryngeal (NL) speakers produced sustained vowel phonation and passage reading. Both acoustic and EGG signals were recorded and analyzed using software programs Praat and Voce Vista. Results indicated that there was a significantly lower fundamental frequency (F0) for TE than NL speakers in passage reading. Significantly higher jitter, shimmer and closed quotient (CQ), and lower harmonic-to-noise ratio (H/N) values were associated with TE speech in both sustained vowel phonation and passage reading. Higher formant frequencies in sustained /i/ phonation were found for TE speakers. The findings appear to explain the perceptually hoarse, breathy and low-pitch voice of TE speech. Results were discussed in terms of higher position, greater tissue density, slower movement during closing phase and aperiodic vibration of neoglottis of TE speakers than the vocal folds of NL speakers.published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesBachelorBachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Science

    Vocal tract modelling in fallow deer: are male groans nasalized?

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    Males of several species of deer have a descended and mobile larynx, resulting in an unusually long vocal tract, which can be further extended by lowering the larynx during call production. Formant frequencies are lowered as the vocal tract is extended, as predicted when approximating the vocal tract as a uniform quarter wavelength resonator. However, formant frequencies in polygynous deer follow uneven distribution patterns, indicating that the vocal tract configuration may in fact be rather complex. We CT-scanned the head and neck region of two adult male fallow deer specimens with artificially extended vocal tracts and measured the cross-sectional areas of the supra-laryngeal vocal tract along the oral and nasal tracts. The CT data was then used to predict the resonances produced by three possible configurations, including the oral vocal tract only, the nasal vocal tract only, or combining both. We found that the area functions from the combined oral and nasal vocal tracts produced resonances more closely matching the formant pattern and scaling observed in fallow deer groans than those predicted by the area functions of the oral vocal tract only or of the nasal vocal tract only. This indicates that the nasal and oral vocal tracts are both simultaneously involved in the production of a nonhuman mammal vocalisation, and suggests that the potential for nasalization in putative oral loud-calls should be carefully considered

    Cross modal perception of body size in domestic dogs (Canis familiaris)

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    While the perception of size-related acoustic variation in animal vocalisations is well documented, little attention has been given to how this information might be integrated with corresponding visual information. Using a cross-modal design, we tested the ability of domestic dogs to match growls resynthesised to be typical of either a large or a small dog to size- matched models. Subjects looked at the size-matched model significantly more often and for a significantly longer duration than at the incorrect model, showing that they have the ability to relate information about body size from the acoustic domain to the appropriate visual category. Our study suggests that the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms at the basis of size assessment in mammals have a multisensory nature, and calls for further investigations of the multimodal processing of size information across animal species
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