Voice cues are used in a similar way by blind and sighted adults when assessing women’s body size

Abstract

Humans’ ability to gauge another person’s body size from their voice alone may serve multiple functions ranging from threat assessment to speaker normalization. However, how this ability is acquired remains unknown. In two experiments we tested whether sighted, congenitally blind and late blind adults could accurately judge the relative heights of women from paired voice stimuli, and importantly, whether errors in size estimation varied with task difficulty across groups. Both blind (n = 56) and sighted (n = 61) listeners correctly judged women’s relative heights on approximately 70% of low difficulty trials, corroborating previous findings for judging men’s heights. However, accuracy dropped to chance levels for intermediate difficulty trials and to 25% for high difficulty trials, regardless of the listener’s sightedness, duration of vision loss, sex, or age. Thus, blind adults estimated women’s height with the same degree of accuracy, but also the same pattern of errors, as did sighted controls. Our findings provide further evidence that visual experience is not necessary for accurate body size estimation. Rather, both blind and sighted listeners appear to follow a general rule, mapping low auditory frequencies to largeness across a range of contexts. This sound-size mapping emerges without visual experience, and is likely very important for humans.

A house of cards: bias in perception of body size mediates the relationship between voice pitch and perceptions of dominance

“…Formant frequencies cannot explain 85% of the variance in body size among same-sex adults. Here it is important to note that even though voice pitch and formants are both tied to the perception of body size (Collins, 2000;Collins & Missing, 2003;Feinberg et al, 2005;Pisanski, Feinberg, Oleszkiewicz, & Sorokowska, 2017;Pisanski et al, 2014b;Pisanski, Oleszkiewicz, & Sorokowska, 2016;Pisanski & Rendall, 2011;Rendall et al, 2007;Smith & Patterson, 2005), and formants are tied to physical height (Pisanski et al, 2014b), these cues are not used in the same way in many mate-choice relevant decisions (Feinberg et al, 2011;Feinberg et al, 2005;Pisanski & Rendall, 2011;Pisanski et al, 2014c). Furthermore, processing of voice pitch and formants take different neural pathways, where voice pitch processing occurs later, and contributes more to bias in perception of size, whereas formant information is used earlier for acoustic size scaling (von Kriegstein, Warren, Ives, Patterson, & Griffiths, 2006), which aids in vowel perception (Turner, Walters, ` Monaghan, & Patterson, 2009).…”

Sensory Exploitation, Sexual Dimorphism, and Human Voice Pitch

“…The perception that low pitch is large and frightening is evident across the animal kingdom, suggesting it is evolutionarily old [6]. The tendency to perceive men with lower voice pitch to be larger is equally evident in congenitally blind and sighted participants, further suggesting it requires no visual learning [9].…”

Human roars communicate upper-body strength more effectively than do screams or aggressive and distressed speech

“…Among humans, the nonverbal components of speech also allow listeners to assess body size from the voice, including height and weight [7–10]. Yet, few studies provide evidence that human listeners can assess physical strength from the human voice.…”