This study investigates the perceptual and acoustic correlates of gender in the prepubertal voice. 23 German-speaking primary school pupils (13 female, 10 male) aged 8–9 years were recorded producing 10 sentences each. Two sentences from each speaker were presented in random order to a group of listeners who were asked to assign a gender to each stimulus. Single utterances from each of the three male and three female speakers whose gender was identified most reliably were played in a second experiment to two further groups of listeners who judged each stimulus against seven perceptual attribute pairs. Acoustic analysis of those parameters corresponding most directly to the perceptual attributes revealed a number of highly significant correlations, indicating some aspects of the voice and speech (f0, harmonics-to-noise ratio, tempo) that children use to construct and adults use to identify gender in the prepubertal voice.
Cite as: Simpson, A.P., Funk, R., Palmer, F. (2017) Perceptual and Acoustic CorreLates of Gender in the Prepubertal Voice. Proc. Interspeech 2017, 914-918, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1055
@inproceedings{simpson17_interspeech,
author={Adrian P. Simpson and Riccarda Funk and Frederik Palmer},
title={{Perceptual and Acoustic CorreLates of Gender in the Prepubertal Voice}},
year=2017,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2017},
pages={914--918},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1055}
}