University of Sussex
Browse

File(s) not publicly available

Are men better than women at acoustic size judgements?

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 18:40 authored by Benjamin D Charlton, Anna M Taylor, David Reby
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.

History

Publication status

  • Published

Journal

Biology Letters

ISSN

1744-9561

Publisher

Royal Society, The

Issue

4

Volume

9

Page range

20130270-20130270

Department affiliated with

  • Psychology Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2014-10-09

Usage metrics

    University of Sussex (Publications)

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC