Content matters: Cyclic effects on women's voices depend on social context

Klatt, Wilhelm K.; Mayer, Boris; Lobmaier, Janek S. (2020). Content matters: Cyclic effects on women's voices depend on social context. Hormones and behavior, 122, p. 104762. Elsevier 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2020.104762

	Text 1-s2.0-S0018506X2030088X-main.pdf - Published Version Restricted to registered users only Available under License Publisher holds Copyright. Download (971kB) | Request a copy
Preview	Text Klatt_Content_Matters_final.pdf - Accepted Version Available under License Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works (CC-BY-NC-ND). Download (252kB) | Preview

Women's voices reportedly sound more attractive during the fertile days compared to the non-fertile days of their menstrual cycle. Here we investigated whether the speech content modulates the cyclic changes in women's voices. We asked 72 men and women to rate how interested they were in getting to know the speaker based on her voice. Forty-two naturally cycling women were recorded once during the late follicular phase (high fertility) and once during the luteal phase (low fertility) while speaking sentences of neutral and social content. Listeners were more interested in getting to know the speakers when hearing sentences with social content. Furthermore, raters were more interested in getting to know the speakers when these were recorded in the late follicular than in the luteal phase, but only in sentences with social content. Notably, levels of reproductive hormones (EP ratio) across the cycle phases did not significantly predict the preference for late follicular voices, but echoing the perceptual ratings, there was a significant EP ratio x speech content interaction. Phonetic analyses of mean fundamental frequency (F0) revealed a main effect of menstrual cycle phase and speech content but no interaction. Employing an action-oriented task, the present study extends findings of cycle-dependent voice changes by emphasising that speech content critically modulates fertility effects.

Interest & Impact

Downloads

46 since deposited on 10 Jun 2020
23 in the past 12 months

Citations

5 Citations in Web of Science ®
6 Citations in Scopus

Search

in Google Scholar™

Services

Actions (login required)

Edit item

Actions (login required)

Edit item