Identification of a speaker's sex: a fricative study

An experiment was carried out to test whether three phonetically naive listeners were able to identify the speaker's sex from brief (30 msec. to 100 msec.) voiceless fricative segments. All speech segments were extracted from sentences spoken by members of a group of 3 women and 3 men with a British General Northern accent. The consonant segments were significantly identified by the listeners with an accuracy of 64.4%. A sample of the fricative segments was chosen to investigate acoustic and phonetic differences related to a speaker's sex, using spectrographic analysis. Analysis showed that on the average the frication of the women's voiceless fricatives was significantly higher in frequency than that of the men.