Dr David Smith D.R.Smith@hull.ac.uk
Senior Lecturer, Director of Studies for Psychology
Speaker-sex discrimination for voiced and whispered vowels at short durations
Smith, David R.R.
Authors
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.
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
Online Publication Date | Oct 3, 2016 |
---|---|
Publication Date | 2016-10 |
Deposit Date | Oct 10, 2016 |
Publicly Available Date | Nov 23, 2017 |
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 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1177/2041669516671320 |
Keywords | Speaker-sex discrimination; Speech; Voiced; Whispered; Duration; Vocal-tract length; Pitch |
Public URL | https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/444006 |
Publisher URL | http://ipe.sagepub.com/content/7/5/2041669516671320 |
Additional Information | Copy of article first published in: i-Perception, 2016, v.7 issue 5 |
Files
Published article
(334 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
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).
You might also like
Speech levels: Do we talk at the same level as we wish others to and assume they do?
(2020)
Journal Article
Does knowing speaker sex facilitate vowel recognition at short durations?
(2014)
Journal Article
How the human brain recognizes speech in the context of changing speakers
(2010)
Journal Article
Size information in the production and perception of communication sounds
(2008)
Book Chapter