The stimulus range of vocal tract length cues impacts voice cue use for gender identification

Adults with normal hearing use fundamental frequency and acoustic correlates of vocal tract length (VTL) for gender identification. The goal of this study was to identify the impact of the range of VTL cues on gender judgments. The fundamental frequency and VTL of resynthesized words were independently scaled, and normal hearing participants were assigned to hear stimuli with either a wide or narrow range of VTL values in a gender identification task. These VTL manipulations yielded larger changes in perceived gender in the narrower than the wider condition, highlighting the impact of the range of stimulus parameters on VTL use.