Pronunciation of 'S' Sounds Influences Gender Perception

According to a new study, researchers have found that a person pronounces the "S" sound influences the listener's perception of whether the speaker is a male or female.

According to Lal Zimman, a researcher from the University of Colorado Boulder, who studied transgender people transitioning from female to male, along with the pitch of a person's voice, the way that person pronounces the "S" sound and the amount of resonance he or she uses when speaking influences the listener's perception of whether the speaker is a male or female.

"In the past, gender differences in the voice have been understood, primarily, as a biological difference," Zimman said in a report by Science Daily. "I really wanted to look at the potential for other factors, other than how testosterone lowers the voice, to affect how a person's voice is perceived."

During the study, voluntary participants were treated with the hormone testosterone. This caused a number of changes in a person's voice including lowering the pitch. Zimman wanted to see how much the pitch of a person's voice influenced the listener's perception of gender. It was found that even if a man's voice pitch was higher than normal, a listener could still recognize it to be a man's voice by the way he pronounces the "S" sound in a lower frequency.

"A high-frequency 's' has long been stereotypically associated with women's speech, as well as gay men's speech, yet there is no biological correlate to this association," said CU-Boulder linguistics and anthropology Associate Professor Kira Hall, who served as Zimman's doctoral adviser. "The project illustrates the socio-biological complexity of pitch: the designation of a voice as more masculine or more feminine is importantly influenced by other ideologically charged speech traits that are socially, not biologically, driven."

A large portion of Zimman's study was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and is now being reviewed for publication.

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