Gender and the integration of acoustic dimensions of prosody: Implicationsfor 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 an y such relationship. The rationale for the investigation was to gain a grea ter understanding of normal prosody and the requirements for control groups in clinical studies of prosody. Ten male and 10 female speakers with no kn own speech or neurological deficits participated in the study. They perform ed a reading task which involved delivering 10 sentences first with a decla rative and then repeated with an interrogative intonation (20 sentences per speaker). Intrasubject and intersubject analyses of the speech data reveal ed a dependence of pitch on duration that differed between male and female speakers. Significant differences between the genders were also found in sp eech rate, pitch range, and pitch slope. The findings suggest that an integ rated treatment of acoustic cues may provide a more invariant feature of no rmal prosody against which clinical groups may be compared. The data also i mply that in clinical studies of the production of prosody gender should be carefully controlled. (C) 2001 Academic Press.