Sex differences in f0

In the last session we discussed whether men have lower voices than women in terms of f0. But why is this interesting? Understanding such things plus some other details can help to explain certain human behaviour at least in certain communcative situations. On top of this scientific interest, there might be personal interests. For example, I might be a singer and have always wondered how single singers can drown out a whole orchestra without any amplifier.

In any case, during our discussion I pretended to be sceptic and asked for an explanation. You suggested that men have longer vocal cords than women and, therefore, lower voices. However, besides your personal convictions, nobody knew of empirical evidence for this claim. Of course, we can't stick out our tongues (very widely) and measure the length of our vocal cords with a fancy pink plastic ruler. What we can do, is check if someone else did something similar, and surprisingly Lieberman and Blumstein (1988; p. 36) did and report that "[t]he longer vocal cords of adult males, which are a consequences of secondary sexual dimorphism in Homo sapiens, yield a lower range of fundamental frequencies."

In addition, we talked about the length of the vocal tract and whether it affects f0. In fact, the longer the vocal tract, the lower are the formant frequencies (Fitch, 2000), and f0 is part of the formant frequencies. Fitch (2000) also states that vocal tract length is correlated positively with body size. From there it's only a small step to sex differences. Men tend to be larger than women, therefore, they will have a longer vocal tract and a lower voice (f0) as we suspected in the beginning. Moreover, now we know some empirical evidence for our claim.

Oh, and then we discussed how to present arguments for a research question...


Lieberman P, & Blumstein, S. (1988). Speech Physiology, Speech Perception, and Acoustic Phonetics. Cambridge University Press.

Fitch, W. T. (2000). The evolution of speech: A comparative review. Trend in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 258-267.

Source-filter theory

How is the sound of our voices actually produced? Alright, you mentioned the vocal cords but how can it be described in (more) detail? Some background information is here... (get your headphones ready!)

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/psychology/rmk/T2/sf_theory.html

http://www.haskins.yale.edu/featured/heads/production.html

Some background on language production

The classic paper: Levelt, W.J.M. and Roelofs, A. and Meyer, A.S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 1-75.

A more recent paper that nicely discusses theoretical views on word production (don't worry, it's short): Navarrete, E. and Costa, A. (2005). Phonological activation of ignored pictures: Further evidence for a cascade model of lexical access, Journal of Memory and Language, 53, 359-377.

But what is prosody?

Just in case explanations weren’t really clear…

(Lexical) prosody concerns the prominence of (parts of) words. For example the prominence of stressed vs unstressed syllables. (In our discussion, it was pointed out correctly that prosody also concerns other properties, eg (rise or fall of) tone in so-called tone languages as in Mandarin Chinese.) (Lexical) stress is seen as linguistic information because it can distinguish between (the meaning of) different words. For example, “forBEAR” and “FORbear” (or “conCRETE” vs “CONcrete”) share the same sequence of sounds (phonemes) but differ in meaning.

Stressed syllables are on average louder, longer, and higher in pitch. This is a perceptual description, ie it describes prominence in psychological terms. However, this information must have a physical correlate. (How could we transmit information otherwise?) So far we know the physical parameters amplitude, duration, and fundamental frequency (f0) corresponding to the above mentioned properties of prominence, respectively. Although there’s a correlation between perceptual properties and physical parameters, this is not an exact (one-to-one) relation. Human voice processing may not change with physical parameters but with prototypicality (natural-manipulated-computer generated); see the Lattner et al paper.

IMPORTANT (electronic university blackboard)

Please check also eleum blackboard for general announcements!!!

Schedule

Mondays afternoon (Did we decide on an exact time?)
Wednesdays 9am.

Unless we use different rooms, the lcoation should be stated here...

Where to find literature

The University library... (Catalogues, Electronic journals)

The psychology portaal (http://www.ub.unimaas.nl/fdp/) may also be helpful

You probably know (and use) the eleum blackboard

• http://eleum.unimaas.nl

See also the links at the right (and top) of the blog.

Keywords to relevant literature

• You may look for general introductions to language (comprehension or production).
  
• Introductions to phonology or phonetics or prosody.
• There's also the Handbook of psycholinguistics.
• neurolinguistics might also be a keyword.
  

• check for articles, incl. reviews (timing, duration, pitch, accent, stress, suprasegmental structure). Anne Cutler is certainly a name to remember... :)
  

• more general: maybe you'll find literature on experimental logic/design helpful.
  

Onderzoekspracticum

Course 2.5a, 2006; "Onderzoek: How to do it!?"

Group 208: Saying „deur“ or „deurbell“: Sex differences in speaking

In spoken communication, people do not only convey information by the content of words (meaning) but also by social cues, e.g. gestures, facial expressions, or intonation (prosody) as in irony or sarcasm. Comprehension studies suggest that women process meaning and prosody of words more automatically than men. Is this only the case during comprehension, i.e. when we listen to some-opne vis-à-vis? Alternatively, are men generally less efficient in using prosody to convey information, i.e. when they speak to other people? In this course, we will examine whether men and women differ in the production of word prosody. To this end, acoustic analyses will be performed on verbal recordings. The results are important for the understanding of communication situations depending on whether people are of the same or different sex as, for example, in personal interviews.