Spontaneous Voice Gender Imitation Abilities in Adult Speakers

Cartei, Valentina; Cowles, H. Wind; Reby, David

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0031353

Cited by 47 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…Given the absence of sex differences in overall anatomical vocal tract length before puberty (Fitch & Giedd, ; Vorperian et al ., ), sex differences in formant spacing suggest that children behaviourally adjust their vocal tract length via lip protrusion (or spreading) and/or larynx lowering (or raising) to advertise their sex in their natural voice. The fact that children further control this parameter when altering the gender of their voice provides tentative support for this hypothesis: both sexes lowered their formant spacing to masculinize their voice and raised them to feminize it, as previously observed in adults (Cartei et al ., ). While the vocal tract adjustments observed here are only temporary, and in response to an explicit request, they nevertheless provide the first evidence that children have the ability to manipulate these acoustic properties to achieve gender‐typed voices.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

“…However, children lowered their mean F 0 when asked to masculinize their voices, whereas they raised it when feminizing their voices. The shifts of F 0 were significant when children were asked to sound like the opposite gender, in line with what was previously reported in adults (Cartei et al ., ). Evidently, children have (at least implicitly) some knowledge of adult sex differences in F 0 and may use it to vary the gender of their voice.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

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Control of voice gender in pre‐pubertal children

Cartei

Cowles

Banerjee

et al. 2013

British J of Dev Psycho

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Adult listeners are capable of identifying the gender of speakers as young as 4 years old from their voice. In the absence of a clear anatomical dimorphism in the dimensions of pre-pubertal boys' and girls' vocal apparatus, the observed gender differences may reflect children's regulation of their vocal behaviour. A detailed acoustic analysis was conducted of the utterances of 34 6-to 9-year-old children, in their normal voices and also when asked explicitly to speak like a boy or a girl. Results showed statistically significant shifts in fundamental and formant frequency values towards those expected from the sex dimorphism in adult voices. Directions for future research on the role of vocal behaviours in pre-pubertal children's expression of gender are considered.Introducing a recent special issue on gender and relationships, Leman and Tenenbaum (2011, p. 153) draw attention to 'the ways in which children practise future gender roles in everyday interactions with their peers and parents'. Indeed, children are known to exhibit gender-typed patterns of behaviour from a young age. Boys and girls prefer gender-normative toys (Martin, Eisenbud, & Rose, 1995) and play styles (Hay et al., 2011;Munroe & Romney, 2006) and are more likely to choose same-sex peers as playmates (Golombok et al., 2008;Zosuls et al., 2011). We also know that young children are capable of regulating their behaviour in gender-typed ways -what we might call 'self-presentation of gender' -under given social circumstances, such as the presence of a same-sex peer group (Banerjee & Lintern, 2001). With regard to verbal behaviour, much attention has been paid to the content, style, language use, and social dynamics of boys' and girls' conversations (e.g., Leaper & Smith, 2004;Leman, Ahmed, & Ozarow, 2005). Yet, surprisingly, one of the most obvious aspects of gender difference in verbal interactions -the voice itself -has been largely ignored.Adults can identify the gender of speakers as young as 4 years of age by listening to their voice only (Perry, Ohde, & Ashmead, 2001). In post-pubertal speakers, sex differences in the dimensions of the vocal apparatus give males a lower fundamental frequency (pitch) and lower vocal tract resonances (or formants). Before puberty, boys also speak with lower vocal tract resonances than girls (but with the same pitch: Perry et al., 2001). However, these acoustic differences are not supported by a corresponding anatomical sex dimorphism, suggesting that they have a strong behavioural dimension: children seem to adjust the length of their vocal tract to produce formant frequencies characteristic of their gender. See Appendix S1 for details on sex dimorphism in the human voice.The hypothesis that children control this aspect of their vocal behaviour is plausible in the light of empirical research showing that children from a young age make use of the voice, along with other cues such as faces, in discriminating males and females (see Ruble, Martin, & Berenbaum, 2006). The expression of voice gender is therefore a v...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Control of voice gender in pre‐pubertal children

Cartei

Cowles

Banerjee

et al. 2013

British J of Dev Psycho

Self Cite

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show abstract

“…If it were, we would expect consistently higher f0 in the boys with GID (as opposed to the lower f0 found in the single-word stimuli) and higher average F1 and F2 values. There is evidence that speakers do manipulate all of these variables when actively attempting to sound like the opposite sex: Indeed, these were the patterns found in a recent study of adult men's imitation of female voice gender by Cartei et al (2012).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 86%

Gender typicality in children's speech: A comparison of boys with and without gender identity disorder

Munson

Crocker

Pierrehumbert

et al. 2015

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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This study examined whether boys with gender identity disorder (GID) produced less prototypically male speech than control boys without GID, a possibility that has been suggested by clinical observations. Two groups of listeners participated in tasks where they rated the gender typicality of single words (group 1) or sentences (group 2) produced by 15 5-13 year old boys with GID and 15 age-matched boys without GID. Detailed acoustic analyses of the stimuli were also conducted. Boys with GID were rated as less boy-like than boys without GID. In the experiment using sentence stimuli, these group differences were larger than in the experiment using single-word stimuli. Listeners' ratings were predicted by a variety of acoustic parameters, including ones that differ between the two groups and ones that are stereotypically associated with adult men's and women's speech. Future research should examine how these variants are acquired.

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“…Remez, Fellowes & Rubin 1997) Second, vocal signals are not exclusively produced in a neutral voice. On the one hand, humans can readily change their voices volitionally, for example to convey particular social traits (Cartei, Cowles, & Reby, 2012;Hughes, Mogilski, & Harrison, 2014) and in audience-dependent ways (e.g. the exaggerated pitch contours of infantdirected speech; Shute & Wheldall, 1989).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impaired generalization of speaker identity in the perception of familiar and unfamiliar voices.

Lavan

Scott

McGettigan

2016

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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In 2 behavioral experiments, we explored how the extraction of identity-related information from familiar and unfamiliar voices is affected by naturally occurring vocal flexibility and variability, introduced by different types of vocalizations and levels of volitional control during production. In a first experiment, participants performed a speaker discrimination task on vowels, volitional (acted) laughter, and spontaneous (authentic) laughter from 5 unfamiliar speakers. We found that performance was significantly impaired for spontaneous laughter, a vocalization produced under reduced volitional control. We additionally found that the detection of identity-related information fails to generalize across different types of nonverbal vocalizations (e.g., laughter vs. vowels) and across mismatches in volitional control within vocalization pairs (e.g., volitional laughter vs. spontaneous laughter), with performance levels indicating an inability to discriminate between speakers. In a second experiment, we explored whether personal familiarity with the speakers would afford greater accuracy and better generalization of identity perception. Using new stimuli, we largely replicated our previous findings: whereas familiarity afforded a consistent performance advantage for speaker discriminations, the experimental manipulations impaired performance to similar extents for familiar and unfamiliar listener groups. We discuss our findings with reference to prototype-based models of voice processing and suggest potential underlying mechanisms and representations of familiar and unfamiliar voice perception.

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Spontaneous Voice Gender Imitation Abilities in Adult Speakers

Cited by 47 publications

References 61 publications

Control of voice gender in pre‐pubertal children

Control of voice gender in pre‐pubertal children

Gender typicality in children's speech: A comparison of boys with and without gender identity disorder

Impaired generalization of speaker identity in the perception of familiar and unfamiliar voices.

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