Can We Identify Gender from Children’s Voices?

Identifying the gender of young children from voice correlates with identification of age and likely physical size.

Listeners may need to consider speaker age when guessing speaker gender and the perception of gender may depend on acoustic information not strictly related to anatomical differences between boys and girls, according to a study published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Gender perception is much more complicated in children because gender differences in speech may emerge before sex-related anatomical differences between speakers.

Voice Disorders | Problems in Voice Production - Causes Symptoms Types
Voice is an effective way of communication in human beings, ranging from getting across one’s point of view to powerfully commanding an army.

‘The perception of gender can depend on subtle cues based on behavior and not from anatomical differences.’

To explore this, researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Texas at Dallas developed a database of speech samples from children ages 5 to 18 to explore two questions: What types of changes occur in children's voices as they become adults, and how do listeners adjust to the enormous variability in acoustic patterns across speakers?

Listeners assess a speaker's gender, age, height, and other physical characteristics based primarily on the speaker's voice pitch and on the resonance (formant frequencies) of their voice.

"Resonance is related to speaker height -- think violin versus cello -- and is a reliable indicator of overall body size," said Santiago Barreda, from the University of California, Davis.

Dysarthria - Causes, Diagnosis, Treatment
Dysarthria is a condition characterized by speech difficulty due to poor or weak speech muscle control.

Apart from these basic cues, there are other more subtle cues related to behavior and the way a person 'chooses' to speak, rather than strictly depending on the speaker's anatomy.

Listeners with both syllables and sentences from different speakers, gender identification improved for sentences. They said this supports the stylistic elements of speech that highlight gender differences and come across better in sentences.

Maternal Voice Reduces Pain in Premature Babies: Study
Maternal voice aids in reducing the signs of pain in premature babies when they undergo life-saving medical interventions.

They made two other important findings. First, listeners can reliably identify the gender of individual children as young as 5.

Second, they found identification of the gender of speakers must take place jointly with the identification of age and likely physical size.

Now Computers can Read Emotions Through Lip - Reading!
Researchers have developed a computer that has the ability to decode human emotions by studying lip pattern

Based on these findings, researchers concluded that when the gender of individual children can be readily identified, it is because of differences in their behavior, in their manner of speaking, rather than because of their anatomy.

In other words, gender information in speech can be largely based on performance rather than on physical differences between male and female speakers.

If gendered speech followed necessarily from speaker anatomy, there would be no basis to reliably identify the gender of little girls and boys.

The performative nature of gender has long been argued on theoretical grounds, and these experimental results support this perspective.

Source-Medindia