Time to judge sex of speaker: Effect of glottal-pulse rate and vocal-tract length

Smith, David R.R.

Abstract

When listening to someone's voice: what stimulus duration is required to tell whether the person speaking is a man or a woman; what are the acoustic cues in speech that influence such judgements; and how does manipulations in these acoustic cues influence such judgements? The vowels of five men and five women were recorded and played at a number of brief durations. The vowels were either unmodified and thus differed in both glottal-pulse rate and vocal-tract length (Expt 1), or had their glottal-pulse rate modified to be the same (Expt 2), or had their simulated vocal-tract length modified to be the same (Expt 3). Listeners were required to indicate whether the vowels were spoken by a man or woman. Results show that correct speaker-sex judgement requires only brief duration stimuli (about 10 ms), and that the removal of either the glottal-pulse rate or the vocal-tract length cue leads to reduced performance in judging the sex of the original speaker.

Citation

Smith, D. R. (2010, August). Time to judge sex of speaker: Effect of glottal-pulse rate and vocal-tract length. Presented at 20th International Congress on Acoustics, ICA 2010, Sydney, Australia

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 20th International Congress on Acoustics, ICA 2010
• Start Date: Aug 23, 2010
• End Date: Aug 27, 2010
• Acceptance Date: Sep 1, 2010
• Publication Date: Dec 1, 2010
• Volume: 5
• Pages: 3673-3676
• Book Title: 20th International Congress on Acoustics 2010, ICA 2010 - Incorporating Proceedings of the 2010 Annual Conference of the Australian Acoustical Society
• ISBN: 9781617827457
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/405746
• Publisher URL: https://www.acoustics.asn.au/conference_proceedings/ICA2010/cdrom-ICA2010/index.htm