What is it about?
Men and women’s voices sound different, in part because their bodies are shaped differently, but some studies suggest that men and women may move their tongue, lips and jaw differently when speaking. We used ultrasound to visualise speech movement and study it directly. We find different patterns of tongue and jaw movement in men and women for several vowel sounds. Generally speaking, women tend to lower their jaw more when pronouncing vowels in words such as 'bad', 'bed', or 'bored'. Strikingly, this increased jaw lowering can affect the resulting sound to different degrees. In some vowels, the resulting sound is markedly different for different genders, while in other vowels, we find differences in jaw movement, but not so much in the resulting sound.
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Why is it important?
The findings help us understand the nature of gender differences in speech, and they allow to us to formulate some hypotheses about why such differences arise in the first place. They can also help develop speech therapy techniques for sounding more feminine or masculine.
Perspectives
The way we speak communicates not just the intended message, but also how we want to perceived. This latter aspect is not always conscious, but it is nevertheless very precise. Our findings highlight the incredibly complex ways in which human beings control very small movements to signal their social identity.
Patrycja Strycharczuk
University of Manchester
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Articulatory Strategies in Male and Female Vowel Production, Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, October 2025, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA),
DOI: 10.1044/2025_jslhr-25-00185.
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