Adrian P. Simpson

Dynamic consequences of differences in male and female vocal tract dimensions

Phonetic differences between male and female speakers are generally considered in terms of the static acoustic and perceptual consequences of different articulatory dimensions. This article investigates the dynamic acoustic and articulatory implications of differences in mean male and female vocal tract dimensions. The temporal acoustic consequences of time-varying twin-tube resonators of different dimensions are explored, and the possible implications for human speech production are considered. Empirical support for the theoretical predictions is sought by investigating the kinematic and acoustic patterns in diphthong productions from 26 female and 22 male speakers in the University of Wisconsin X-ray Microbeam Speech Production Database. Aside from expected acoustic differences, the shape of male and female formant tracks plotted in Bark space is found to be very similar. Male and female patterns of tongue movement, however, are found to be very dissimilar. The mean male diphthong, defined by the tracks of four midsagittal pellets, is characterized by greater pellet excursions, higher pellet speed, and consistently larger dorso-palatal strictures than its female counterpart. The empirical findings suggest that gender-specific dynamic behavior could be an important factor in accounting for nonuniform vowel system differences, but at the same time having more wide-ranging implications for transitional phenomena and undershoot.

Phonetic differences between male and female speech

The main phonetic differences between the speech of male and female speakers are described and explanations that have been offered to account for these differences are critically discussed.

Auditory Adaptation in Voice Perception

Perceptual aftereffects following adaptation to simple stimulus attributes (e.g., motion, color) have been studied for hundreds of years. A striking recent discovery was that adaptation also elicits contrastive aftereffects in visual perception of complex stimuli and faces [1-6]. Here, we show for the first time that adaptation to nonlinguistic information in voices elicits systematic auditory aftereffects. Prior adaptation to male voices causes a voice to be perceived as more female (and vice versa), and these auditory aftereffects were measurable even minutes after adaptation. By contrast, crossmodal adaptation effects were absent, both when male or female first names and when silently articulating male or female faces were used as adaptors. When sinusoidal tones (with frequencies matched to male and female voice fundamental frequencies) were used as adaptors, no aftereffects on voice perception were observed. This excludes explanations for the voice aftereffect in terms of both pitch adaptation and postperceptual adaptation to gender concepts and suggests that contrastive voice-coding mechanisms may routinely influence voice perception. The role of adaptation in calibrating properties of high-level voice representations indicates that adaptation is not confined to vision but is a ubiquitous mechanism in the perception of nonlinguistic social information from both faces and voices.

Gender-specific articulatory–acoustic relations in vowel sequences

Abstract Differences in male and female vocal tract dimensions are hypothesized to have a number of dynamic consequences—differences in target attainment, articulatory speed, and acoustic vowel space dimension. Evidence for some of these predictions is sought by investigating articulatory and acoustic patterns in interword vowel sequences in the University of Wisconsin X-ray Microbeam Speech Production Database ( UW-XRMBDB ). Means of formant and lingual pellet tracks throughout such vocalic stretches exhibit similarities in acoustic and articulatory form for male and female groups, but show significant gender-specific differences in both articulatory and acoustic space traversed, with females making greater acoustic excursions for shorter articulatory distances.

The first and second harmonics should not be used to measure breathiness in male and female voices

Abstract A well-established difference between male and female voices is the greater degree of breathy voice used by women. The acoustic measure that has most commonly been used to validate this difference is the amplitude of the first two harmonics relative to each other, as well as in relation to other spectral parameters. This paper suggests that sex-specific differences in the harmonic expression of nasality combined with the high likelihood of nasality being present in the open vowels, which have often been used to minimise the effect of F1 on the lowest harmonics, make H1 and H2 inappropriate reference points to measure sex-specific differences in breathiness. The relative harmonic amplitude patterns are replicated using formant synthesis (SenSyn).

Speaker perception: Speaker perception

While humans use their voice mainly for communicating information about the world, paralinguistic cues in the voice signal convey rich dynamic information about a speakers arousal and emotional state, and extralinguistic cues reflect more stable speaker characteristics including identity, biological sex and social gender, socioeconomic or regional background, and age. Here we review the anatomical and physiological bases for individual differences in the human voice, before discussing how recent methodological progress in voice morphing and voice synthesis has promoted research on current theoretical issues, such as how voices are mentally represented in the human brain. Special attention is dedicated to the distinction between the recognition of familiar and unfamiliar speakers, in everyday situations or in the forensic context, and on the processes and representational changes that accompany the learning of new voices. We describe how specific impairments and individual differences in voice perception could relate to specific brain correlates. Finally, we consider that voices are produced by speakers who are often visible during communication, and review recent evidence that shows how speaker perception involves dynamic face-voice integration. The representation of para- and extralinguistic vocal information plays a major role in person perception and social communication, could be neuronally encoded in a prototype-referenced manner, and is subject to flexible adaptive recalibration as a result of specific perceptual experience. WIREs Cogn Sci 2014, 5:15-25. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1261 CONFLICT OF INTEREST: The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Acoustic and auditory correlates of non-pulmonic sound production in German

Different types of non-pulmonic sound production found in read and spontaneous German are described and exemplified. Stop releases driven by a glottalic airstream are found in sequences of final plosive plus glottalized vowel onset. Both ingressive and egressive velaric stop releases are considered to arise from double occlusions involving partial articulatory overlap in sequences of dorsal stop followed by an apical or bilabial stop. Certain aspects of the articulatory and aerodynamic mechanisms involved remain unclear. However, it is argued that an identification of these patterns in the acoustic record alone provides an invaluable insight into aspects of articulatory synchronization in types of spoken language, such as conversation, which are not generally amenable to the more intrusive methods of articulatory analysis.

Does articulatory reduction miss more patterns than it accounts for

Articulatory explanations are often proposed to account for many of the phonetic patterns found in speech beyond the citation form. Unscripted material from Suffolk English and North German is used to argue that articulatory explanation can too tightly constrain our expectations of the types of phonetic patterns which spontaneous speech contains. It is also shown how articulatory explanation can offer an adequate account of a dataset, stopping short of revealing a larger, more complex set of phonetic patterns.

Differences in acoustic vowel space and the perception of speech tempo

Abstract Despite various studies describing longer segment durations and slower speaking rates in females than males, there appears to be a stereotype of women speaking faster than men. To investigate the mismatch between empirical evidence and this widespread stereotype, listening experiments were conducted to test whether a relationship between perceived tempo and acoustic vowel space size might exists. If a speaker traverses a larger acoustic vowel space than another speaker within the same time then this speaker might be perceived as speaking faster. To test this, two listening experiments with either exclusively female or male speakers but with varying vowel space sizes were conducted. Listeners were asked to rate the perceived speech tempo of same-sex speaker pairs. The stimuli were manipulated to have the same segment durations and f0 contour. Results indicate that a positive correlation between acoustic vowel space size and perceived speech tempo exists. Since females exhibit on average a larger acoustic vowel space than males, it is suggested that the stereotype of faster speaking women might arise from this.

Casual speech rules and what the phonology of connected speech might really be like

The ways of accounting for the phonetics of data beyond the citation form have been strikingly uniform. The phonetics of an item in non-citationform utterance are derived via a set of connected/casual speech rules/ processes from those of the same item in its citation form. Using conversational material from Suffolk English I show how two approaches can produce completely different results. The first approach is that outlined above; the second accounts for the phonetics of conversational material in its own terms, that is, without making reference to any citation-form phonetics. The second approach provides a unitary account of complex articulatory and phonatory activity that the first approach fails to relate at all.