[The voice as an anthropologic marker system, its constitutional correlates and characteristics]

The nonverbal component of human speech contains some information about the speaker himself, which for example enables listeners to recognize speakers from their voice. Here it was examined to what extent the speaker's body size and shape are betrayed in his speech signal and thus can be recognized by listeners. Contrary to earlier constitutional studies only size and not shape correlates with acoustical parameters of speech; comparing listening experiments with acoustical analysis gives some evidence that the average sound spectrum is used by listeners for judging speaker's body size.