title: 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.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire Parole et Langage, CNRS & Aix-Marseille University, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence 13604, France. yohana.leveque@lpl-aix.fr
authors.forename: Yohana
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Lévêque
authors.forename: Antoine
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Giovanni
authors.forename: Daniele
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Schön
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001307:Auditory Perception; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010898:Pitch Perception; D011930:Reaction Time; D012737:Sex Factors; D063346:Singing; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013997:Time Factors; D014833:Voice Quality; D055815:Young Adult