Journal article

Associations Between Speaking Fundamental Frequency, Vowel Formant Frequencies, and Listener Perceptions of Speaker Gender and Vocal Femininity-Masculinity

Yeptain Leung, Jennifer Oates, Siew-Pang Chan, Viktoria Papp

JOURNAL OF SPEECH LANGUAGE AND HEARING RESEARCH | AMER SPEECH-LANGUAGE-HEARING ASSOC | Published : 2021

Abstract

Purpose The aim of the study was to examine associations between speaking fundamental frequency (f os), vowel formant frequencies (F), listener perceptions of speaker gender, and vocal femininity-masculinity. Method An exploratory study was undertaken to examine associations between f os, F 1-F 3, listener perceptions of speaker gender (nominal scale), and vocal femininity-masculinity (visual analog scale). For 379 speakers of Australian English aged 18-60 years, f os mode and F 1-F 3 (12 monophthongs; total of 36 Fs) were analyzed on a standard reading passage. Seventeen listeners rated speaker gender and vocal femininity-masculinity on randomized audio recordings of these speakers. Results..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by Australian Research Council


Funding Acknowledgements

This work was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship held by the first author. The research underpinning this publication was undertaken while completing a PhD at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. The authors also express their heartfelt appreciation to Dominique Estival and Steve Cassidy for their assistance in accessing the AusTalk data. The AusTalk corpus was collected as part of the Big ASC project, funded by the Australian Research Council (LE100100211). See https://bigasc.edu.au/for details. The authors also thank the 17 listeners who participated in this study.