Voice similarity in identical twins.
If people are asked to discriminate visually the two individuals of a monozygotic twin (MT), they mostly get into trouble. Does this problem also exist when listening to twin voices? Twenty female and 10 male MT voices were randomly assembled with one "strange" voice to get voice trios. The listeners (10 female students in Speech and Language Pathology) were asked to label the twins (voices 1-2, 1-3 or 2-3) in two conditions: two standard sentences read aloud and a 2.5-second midsection of a sustained /a/. The proportion correctly labelled twins was for female voices 82% and 63% and for male voices 74% and 52% for the sentences and the sustained /a/ respectively, both being significantly greater than chance (33%). The acoustic analysis revealed a high intra-twin correlation for the speaking fundamental frequency (SFF) of the sentences and the fundamental frequency (F0) of the sustained /a/. So the voice pitch could have been a useful characteristic in the perceptual identification of the twins. We conclude that there is a greater perceptual resemblance between the voices of identical twins than between voices without genetic relationship. The identification however is not perfect. The voice pitch possibly contributes to the correct twin identifications.
Department of ENT, Head and Neck Surgery, U.Z. St. Rafaël, Kapucijnenvoer 33, B-3000 Leuven.
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Van Gysel
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Vercammen
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Debruyne
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014430:Twins, Monozygotic / Q000235:genetics*; D014831:Voice / Q000235:genetics* / Q000502:physiology*