Abstract
Speech routinely provides cues as to the sex of the talker; in voiced sounds, these cues mainly reflect dimorphism in vocal anatomy. This dimorphism is not symmetrical, however, since during adolescent development, males specifically diverge from a previously shared trajectory with females. We therefore predicted that listeners would show a corresponding perceptual advantage for male sounds in talker-sex discrimination, a hypothesis tested using very brief, one- to eight-cycle vowel segments. The expected performance asymmetry was observed in threshold-like tests of multiple different vowels in Experiments 1–3, and a signal detection design in Experiment 4 helped rule out possible response bias effects. In confirming our counterintuitive prediction, the present study illustrates that a biological and evolutionary perspective can be helpful in understanding indexical cuing in speech.
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This work was supported in part by NIMH Prime Award 1 R01 MH65317–01A2, Subaward 8402-15235-X, an NSF POWRE award, a Georgia State University Research Initiation Grant, and the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience under the STC Program of the National Science Foundation, Agreement No. IBN-9876754.
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Owren, M.J., Berkowitz, M. & Bachorowski, JA. Listeners judge talker sex more efficiently from male than from female vowels. Perception & Psychophysics 69, 930–941 (2007). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193930
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193930