Elsevier

Speech Communication

Volume 122, September 2020, Pages 11-18
Speech Communication

The effect of female voice on verbal processing

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2020.04.004Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Semantically associated primes facilitate the processing of target words.

  • Absolute reaction times and semantic/associative priming did not show effects of gender in a lexical decision task.

  • Female mean pitch or formants are not predictive of the effect of semantic/associative priming.

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Gender
Verbal processing
Semantic priming effect
Pitch
Formants

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