Are men better than women at acoustic size judgements?

Abstract

Formants are important phonetic elements of human speech that are also used by humans and non-human mammals to assess the body size of potential mates and rivals. As a consequence, it has been suggested that formant perception, which is crucial for speech perception, may have evolved through sexual selection. Somewhat surprisingly, though, no previous studies have examined whether sexes differ in their ability to use formants for size evaluation. Here, we investigated whether men and women differ in their ability to use the formant frequency spacing of synthetic vocal stimuli to make auditory size judgements over a wide range of fundamental frequencies (the main determinant of vocal pitch). Our results reveal that men are significantly better than women at comparing the apparent size of stimuli, and that lower pitch improves the ability of both men and women to perform these acoustic size judgements. These findings constitute the first demonstration of a sex difference in formant perception, and lend support to the idea that acoustic size normalization, a crucial prerequisite for speech perception, may have been sexually selected through male competition. We also provide the first evidence that vocalizations with relatively low pitch improve the perception of size-related formant information.

Can blind persons accurately assess body size from the voice?

“…Our results show that this ability does not deteriorate with age. Previous studies report equivocal findings as to whether male listeners process size information differently from female listeners [3,9,10]. In our study, listener sex had no effect.…”

“…Several studies have demonstrated that sighted human listeners can accurately assess men's relative body size from the voice alone, typically associating lower fundamental and formant frequencies with larger size [3,9,10]. However, how we acquire this ability remains unknown.…”

Low is large: spatial location and pitch interact in voice-based body size estimation

“…Following previous studies that had examined body size estimation using manipulated voice stimuli (e.g., Charlton, Taylor, & Reby, 2013;Pisanski, Oleszkiewicz, & Sorokowska, 2016;Rendall et al, 2007), participants rated the apparent Blargeness^of the person whose voice they heard on each trial, and they were not instructed as to which aspect of body size (height, weight) they should focus on during this task. This method allowed for our results to be more directly comparable to those of previous work examining body size estimation, but also to studies examining pitch-size associations more broadly (see, e.g., Ohala, 1984, andParise, 2016, for reviews).…”

“…When using manipulated vocal stimuli, most studies, including the present study, have asked participants to assess the body size of speakers on Blargeness,^without biasing listeners to focus on either height or weight (e.g., Charlton et al, 2013;Rendall et al, 2007). This is of course also the case for studies examining pitch-size mapping more broadly-for instance, between tones and inanimate objects (Parise, 2016, for a review), for which a height/weight distinction is less sensible.…”

“…Previous work has shown that both low pitch and low formants are independently associated with perceptions of large size, but that they also interact in complex ways that affect size estimation (Feinberg, Jones, DeBruine, O'Connor, Tigue, & Borak, 2011;Smith & Patterson, 2005). For instance, although pitch is only weakly related to body size among same-sex adults, low voice pitch increases the spectral density of a vocal signal and the saliency of formant frequencies, making it easier for listeners to estimate body size (Charlton et al, 2013;. Future work may examine whether formant frequencies and voice pitch elicit similar frequency-elevation mappings, and whether spatial cues affect formant-based size estimation.…”