Perceptual and Acoustic CorreLates of Gender in the Prepubertal Voice

This study investigates the perceptual and acoustic correlates of gender in the prepubertal voice. 23 German-speaking primary school pupils (13 female, 10 male) aged 8–9 years were recorded producing 10 sentences each. Two sentences from each speaker were presented in random order to a group of listeners who were asked to assign a gender to each stimulus. Single utterances from each of the three male and three female speakers whose gender was identified most reliably were played in a second experiment to two further groups of listeners who judged each stimulus against seven perceptual attribute pairs. Acoustic analysis of those parameters corresponding most directly to the perceptual attributes revealed a number of highly significant correlations, indicating some aspects of the voice and speech (f0, harmonics-to-noise ratio, tempo) that children use to construct and adults use to identify gender in the prepubertal voice.