Identification of a speaker's sex: a study of vowels.

An experiment was carried out to test whether three phonetically naive listeners were able to identify a speaker's sex from brief natural vowel segments. All speech segments presented to the listeners were extracted from sentences spoken by members of a group of three women and three men with a British General Northern accent. Analysis showed that listeners were able to identify the speaker's sex from the vowel segments with high accuracy (a mean score of 98.9%, p < .001). Acoustic analyses were subsequently carried out to quantify the acoustic and phonetic differences related to the sex of the speakers. Fundamental frequencies and format frequencies of the vowel stimuli were investigated. The men generally had lower values of both than the women.