The effect of female voice on verbal processing

Smorenburg, B.J.L.; Chen, A. (2020)

Article / Letter to editor

Previous studies have suggested that female voices may impede verbal processing. For example, words were remembered less well and lexical decision was slower when spoken by a female speaker. The current study tried to replicate this gender effect in an auditory semantic/associative priming task that excluded any effects of speaker variability and extended previous research by examining the role of two voice features important in perceived gender: pitch and formant frequencies. Additionally, listener gender was included in the experimental design. Results show that, contrary to previous findings, there is no evidence that a lexical decision of a target word is slower when spoken by a female speaker than by a male speaker for female and male listeners. Additionally, the semantic/associative priming effect was not affected by speaker gender, neither did female mean pitch or formants predict the semantic/associative priming effect. At the behavioural level, the current study found no evidence for a gender effect in a semantic/associative priming task.

• Gender
• Verbal processing
• Semantic priming effect
• Pitch
• Formants

• All authors: Smorenburg, B.J.L.; Chen, A.
• Date: 2020-05-20
• Journal: Speech Communication
• Volume: 122
• Pages: 11 - 18
• DOI: doi:10.1016/j.specom.2020.04.004
• Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2020.04.004