Effects of humanness and gender in voice processing

Abstract

When we observe a producible human movement, the brain performs a specific perception–action matching process, which possibly facilitates perceptual processing. In this work, we wanted to study whether the producibility of a sound affects the speed at which it is categorized. Participants were presented with isolated sounds, either sung by a natural male or female voice (‘producible’) or distorted by saturation (‘non-producible’), and had to categorize them as produced by a voice or by a machine. We analyzed reaction time variations as a function of the gender and humanness of the voice. Results corroborate the existence of a ‘human bias’ in auditory perception, and suggest a processing speed asymmetry between natural female and male voices.

Key words::

• Auditory discrimination
• gender effect
• motor representations
• reaction time
• singing voice

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest.