Speaker-sex discrimination for voiced and whispered vowels at short durations

Smith, David.; Smith, David R.R..

doi:10.1177/2041669516671320

Authors

Dr David Smith D.R.Smith@hull.ac.uk
Lecturer, Head Tutor for Year 2 (Level 5), and Academic Contact (Grimsby) IFHE Psychology

Abstract

Whispered vowels, produced with no vocal fold vibration, lack the periodic temporal fine structure which in voiced vowels underlies the perceptual attribute of pitch (a salient auditory cue to speaker sex). Voiced vowels possess no temporal fine structure at very short durations (below two glottal cycles). The prediction was that speaker-sex discrimination performance for whispered and voiced vowels would be similar for very short durations but, as stimulus duration increases, voiced vowel performance would improve relative to whispered vowel performance as pitch information becomes available. This pattern of results was shown for women’s but not for men’s voices. A whispered vowel needs to have a duration three times longer than a voiced vowel before listeners can reliably tell whether it’s spoken by a man or woman (∼30 ms vs. ∼10 ms). Listeners were half as sensitive to information about speaker-sex when it is carried by whispered compared with voiced vowels.

Publication Date	2016-10
Journal	i-Perception
Print ISSN	2041-6695
Electronic ISSN	2041-6695
Publisher	SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	7
Issue	5
Article Number	2041669516671320
Institution Citation	Smith, D. R. (2016). Speaker-sex discrimination for voiced and whispered vowels at short durations. i-Perception, 7(5), https://doi.org/10.1177/2041669516671320
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1177/2041669516671320
Keywords	Speaker-sex discrimination; Speech; Voiced; Whispered; Duration; Vocal-tract length; Pitch
Publisher URL	http://ipe.sagepub.com/content/7/5/2041669516671320
Copyright Statement	This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/...m/open-access-at-sage).
Additional Information	Copy of article first published in: i-Perception, 2016, v.7 issue 5

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Copyright Statement
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).