School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK.
Biol Lett. 2013 May 29;9(4):20130270. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2013.0270. Print 2013 Aug 23.
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.
共振峰是人类语音的重要语音元素，人类和非人类哺乳动物也用共振峰来评估潜在配偶和对手的体型。因此，有人认为，对于语音感知至关重要的共振峰感知可能是通过性选择进化而来的。然而，令人惊讶的是，以前没有研究过性别在使用共振峰进行大小评估方面是否存在差异。在这里，我们研究了男性和女性在使用合成语音刺激的共振峰频率间隔来进行听觉大小判断方面是否存在差异，这些判断涵盖了广泛的基频范围（音高的主要决定因素）。我们的结果表明，男性在比较刺激物的表观大小方面明显优于女性，而且较低的音高提高了男性和女性进行这些声学大小判断的能力。这些发现首次证明了共振峰感知方面的性别差异，并支持了这样一种观点，即对于语音感知至关重要的声学大小归一化可能是通过雄性竞争而被性选择的。我们还首次提供了证据表明，具有相对较低音高的发声可以改善对与大小相关的共振峰信息的感知。
