PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of head position on unfamiliar listeners’ perception of vocal masculinity.
METHOD: Twelve cisgender women were recruited as speaking participants in this study. Participants were recorded reciting two voiced sentences at eight time points with varying head positions including baseline, flexed, and extended. Voice samples were cropped and fundamental frequency (fo) was resynthesized to control for any changes in fo across conditions. Twelve cisgender adults were recruited as listening participants. Listeners were presented with 144 paired comparisons of speaker samples and were prompted to select the sample that sounded more masculine in each presented pairing. Ratings of masculinity were analyzed using Thurstone’s law of comparative judgment. A repeated measures one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to assess the effect of head positioning and repetition, followed by Dunnett’s post hoc tests for significant factors.
RESULTS: The ANOVA showed a statistically significant effect of head position on listener perceptions of masculinity. Dunnett’s post hoc tests revealed a statistically significant effect of the flexed position and no statistically significant effect of the extended compared to the neutral condition.
CONCLUSION: Speakers’ voices in the flexed head position were perceived as most masculine by unfamiliar listeners. Overall, the results of this study support the use of head posture manipulation to achieve increased vocal masculinity, which adds to the limited research related to voice masculinization strategies for those seeking gender-affirming voice care.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/48762 |
| Date | 14 May 2024 |
| Creators | Howerton, Claire Elizabeth |
| Contributors | Stepp, Cara E. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
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