The acoustic and perceptual correlates of gender in children's voices

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Until puberty there are hardly any anatomical and physiological differences in the vocal apparatus of girls and boys. Nevertheless, gender-specific differences have repeatedly been found in prepubertal voices, in some cases from the age of two and a half years. In addition, adult listeners are able to identify the sex from a child's voice better than chance. In individual cases, recognition even rises well above 90% and reaches gender recognition values otherwise found in adult voices.In recent years, the construction of gender in childhood has attracted increasing interest, not least due to a sharp increase in the number of children in Germany and other countries diagnosed with gender dysphoria. The study of the vocal expression of gender thus has a high social relevance as well as a scientific one. In the proposed project, the perceptual and acoustic correlates of gender in prepubertal voices will be investigated in a long-term study. Recordings of the same primary school children will be made at three points in time (1st-3rd grade). There are only very few studies on the vocal expression of gender in children with German mother tongue and, as yet, no long-term study.