Gender Differences in Acoustic Speech Perception and Production: Effects of articulatory flexibility on performance and intelligibility of speech Público

Abstract

Language and speech production are characterized by a considerable amount of individual and group variation, which influences social communications and interactions. The current study investigated pronunciation differences between male and female speakers, as well as how a lexical characteristic such as word frequency affected productions. I hypothesized that males and females would differ in the production of speech due to articulatory flexibility, or how distinctively they produce the acoustic-phonetic properties of each utterance. Female speakers were hypothesized to show greater articulatory flexibility and to change their productions more as a function of word frequency than males.  My study included high and low frequency words produced by 9 male and 9 female speakers. I measured fundamental frequency (F0), word and vowel duration, and by-vowel and by-speaker vowel dispersion and examined the effects of speaker gender and word frequency. Although measures of vowel dispersion did not differ significantly as a function of speaker gender or word frequency, there were significant effects of both word frequency and gender on duration measures, suggesting that males and females may differ in their production of spoken language. Females had longer vowel duration than males, and both vowel and word durations were longer for low frequency words. Female speakers also varied their vowel duration more as a function of word frequency than did male speakers.  These differences in duration might be related to articulatory effort, and indicative of articulation flexibility. These differences could be one way in which individuals “perform” their gender in social communication. Future research should consider expanding on the idea that these differences in pronunciation are meant to perform gender and include a perceptual analysis of speech to observe any effects of gender and articulatory flexibility on intelligibility. 

Table of Contents

Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 1

           Gender Differences in Communication...............................................................................1

           Individual and Group Differences in Pronunciation............................................................3

           Gender Differences in Articulatory Flexibility and Precision Through Dispersion..............6

           Consequences of Gender Differences in Speech and Language.........................................7

           Linguistic Properties and Gender Differences in Pronunciation.........................................9

           The Current Study..............................................................................................................11

Method...........................................................................................................................................12

           Speech Stimuli...................................................................................................................12

           Word Stimuli......................................................................................................................13

           Acoustic Measures.............................................................................................................13

Results............................................................................................................................................15

           Fundamental Frequency.....................................................................................................15

           Word Duration...................................................................................................................15

           Vowel Duration..................................................................................................................16

           By-speaker Vowel Dispersion...........................................................................................17

           By-vowel Vowel Dispersion..............................................................................................18

Discussion......................................................................................................................................19

References......................................................................................................................................25

Appendix........................................................................................................................................32

About this Honors Thesis

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School	Emory College
Department	Psychology
Subfield / Discipline	Cognition and Development
Degree	B.A.
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Psychology, Behavioral
Palabra Clave	Gender Speech Language
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Nygaard, Lynne, Emory University
Committee Members	Gouzoules, Harold, Emory University Tamasi, Susan, Emory University

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