The consistent, but often wrong, impressions people form of the size of unseen speakers are not random but rather point to a consistent misattribution bias, one that the advertising, broadcasting, and entertainment industries also routinely exploit. The authors report 3 experiments examining the perceptual basis of this bias. The results indicate that, under controlled experimental conditions, listeners can make relative size distinctions between male speakers using reliable cues carried in voice formant frequencies (resonant frequencies, or timbre) but that this ability can be perturbed by discordant voice fundamental frequency (F-sub-0, or pitch) differences between speakers. The authors introduce 3 accounts for the perceptual pull that voice F-sub-0 can exert on our routine (mis)attributions of speaker size and consider the role that voice F-sub-0 plays in additional voice-based attributions that may or may not be reliable but that have clear size connotations.

Whether voice formants provide reliable cues to adult body size has been contested recently for some animals and humans and the outcome bears critically on theories of social competition and mate choice, language origins, and speaker normalization. We report two experiments to test listeners’ ability to assess speaker body size. In Experiment 1, listeners heard paired comparisons of the same short phrase spoken by two adults of the same sex paired randomly with respect to height and indicated which was larger. Both sexes (M=20; F=22) showed an equal but modest ability to identify the larger male (mean correct=58.5%; T=31.5, P<0.001) that correlated with the magnitude of their height difference but could not pick the larger female (mean correct=52.0%; T=1.05, P=0.305) regardless of the height difference. Experiment 2 used single word comparisons, focused only on male voices, and controlled F0 while manipulating F1−F4 between speakers. When F0 was equal but F1−F4 predicted the height difference between speakers, both sexes (M=12; F=18) correctly chose the taller male (80%). When F1−F4 values of the shorter male were reduced below those of the taller male (or vice versa), subjects shifted to pick the shorter male as being larger.