Gender and the Integration of Acoustic Dimensions of Prosody: Implications for Clinical Studies

This study was conducted to detect the existence of a relationship between spectral and temporal prosodic cues and to examine gender differences in any such relationship. The rationale for the investigation was to gain a greater understanding of normal prosody and the requirements for control groups in clinical studies of prosody. Ten male and 10 female speakers with no known speech or neurological deficits participated in the study. They performed a reading task which involved delivering 10 sentences first with a declarative and then repeated with an interrogative intonation (20 sentences per speaker). Intrasubject and intersubject analyses of the speech data revealed a dependence of pitch on duration that differed between male and female speakers. Significant differences between the genders were also found in speech rate, pitch range, and pitch slope. The findings suggest that an integrated treatment of acoustic cues may provide a more invariant feature of normal prosody against which clinical groups may be compared. The data also imply that in clinical studies of the production of prosody gender should be carefully controlled.