Voice and gender : the effect of gendered voice input on the voice of prepubertal boys

Abstract

The development of pre-pubertal children’s gendered voice was scarcely investigated. It was hypothesized that they might learn by imitating voices of the same gender. A total of 22 boys aged 6 to 9 years watched a video-clip with characters speaking in either masculine voice or children’s voice depending on the group assigned. Voice samples of isolated vowels, sentence and spontaneous speech were elicited in three phases: pre-treatment, post-treatment and retention. Acoustic analyses of fundamental frequencies and formant frequencies, and perceptual judgment of masculinity and femininity on a 10-point interval scale by experienced speech therapists underwent statistical analyses by mixed analysis of variance. The results revealed no significant effect of video stimuli by both acoustic and perceptual parameters on both control and treatment groups. Possible reasons were discussed in terms of video deficit effect (Anderson & Pempek, 2005) and social cognitive theory. Further improvements and direction for future studies were suggested.