7 research outputs found
Spontaneous Voice Gender Imitation Abilities in Adult Speakers
Background
The frequency components of the human voice play a major role in signalling the gender of the speaker. A voice imitation study was conducted to investigate individuals' ability to make behavioural adjustments to fundamental frequency (F0), and formants (Fi) in order to manipulate their expression of voice gender.
Methodology/Principal Findings
Thirty-two native British-English adult speakers were asked to read out loud different types of text (words, sentence, passage) using their normal voice and then while sounding as âmasculineâ and âfeminineâ as possible. Overall, the results show that both men and women raised their F0 and Fi when feminising their voice, and lowered their F0 and Fi when masculinising their voice.
Conclusions/Significance
These observations suggest that adult speakers are capable of spontaneous glottal and vocal tract length adjustments to express masculinity and femininity in their voice. These results point to a âgender codeâ, where speakers make a conventionalized use of the existing sex dimorphism to vary the expression of their gender and gender-related attributes
Voice-based assessments of trustworthiness, competence, and warmth in blind and sighted adults
The study of voice perception in congenitally blind individuals allows researchers rare insight into how a lifetime of visual deprivation affects the development of voice perception. Previous studies have suggested that blind adults outperform their sighted counterparts in low-level auditory tasks testing spatial localization and pitch discrimination, as well as in verbal speech processing; however, blind persons generally show no advantage in nonverbal voice recognition or discrimination tasks. The present study is the first to examine whether visual experience influences the development of social stereotypes that are formed on the basis of nonverbal vocal characteristics (i.e., voice pitch). Groups of 27 congenitally or early-blind adults and 23 sighted controls assessed the trustworthiness, competence, and warmth of men and women speaking a series of vowels, whose voice pitches had been experimentally raised or lowered. Blind and sighted listeners judged both menâs and womenâs voices with lowered pitch as being more competent and trustworthy than voices with raised pitch. In contrast, raised-pitch voices were judged as being warmer than were lowered-pitch voices, but only for womenâs voices. Crucially, blind and sighted persons did not differ in their voice-based assessments of competence or warmth, or in their certainty of these assessments, whereas the association between low pitch and trustworthiness in womenâs voices was weaker among blind than sighted participants. This latter result suggests that blind persons may rely less heavily on nonverbal cues to trustworthiness compared to sighted persons. Ultimately, our findings suggest that robust perceptual associations that systematically link voice pitch to the social and personal dimensions of a speaker can develop without visual input