The acoustic and perceptual correlates of gender in children's voices

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Adrian Paul Simpson
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 440882807

Until puberty, girls and boys show hardly any anatomical and physiological differences in the larynx and vocal tract. Gender-specific differences have repeatedly been found in the voices of prepubertal children, some as young as two and-a-half-years old. Listening experiments also show that some children sound particularly feminine or masculine even at a young age. As the construction of gender and gender roles becomes more and more important, the study of the vocal expression of gender is not only of significant relevance from a scientific but also from a social perspective. In this project, the perceptual and acoustic correlates of gender in prepubertal voices are examined in a long-term study. To date, voice recordings of the same primary school children have been made at four points in time (first to fourth grade, six to ten years old) and various perception experiments have been carried out. The long-term study will be continued in the proposed extension. Further recordings will be made of the same children (fifth to seventh grade) who were recorded in the first project phase, and further perception experiments will be carried out. Since the children will then be between eleven and thirteen years old, it will be possible to make recordings up until the onset of puberty. A long-term project of this kind is unique in the German-speaking area and has only rarely been carried out internationally. With the help of these longitudinal recordings, insights can be gained into change and variation in children's voices, which can also be linked to psychological dimensions such as a child's self-ascribed gender role orientation. The continuity of the recordings up to puberty will make it possible to examine specific effects of puberty on the voice of individual children. In addition, gender-related acoustic and perceptual differences can be analyzed over time and used in speech therapy for children with gender dysphoria. Last but not least, the voice recordings can be used as valuable resource in forensic phonetics.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants