Voices of athletes reveal only modest acoustic correlates of stature Free

Recent studies of acoustic cues to body‐size in nonhuman primate and human vocalizations have produced results varying from very strong relationships between formant frequencies and length/weight in rhesus monkeys to weak correlations between formants and stature in humans. The current work attempted to address these discrepancies by compiling a database of naturally occurring speech with a large number of vocalizers of maximally varying size. To that end, fundamental frequency (F0) and formant frequencies were measured in both running speech and filled pauses (i.e., ‘‘ah’’ and ‘‘um’’) produced by male athletes during televised same‐day interviews. Multiple‐regression analysis of data from 100 male athletes showed that these acoustic measures accounted for at most 17% of variance in height over a 37‐cm range. Analyses of filled speech pauses produced by a subset of 48 athletes could account for up to 36%. These outcomes fall within the range of previously reported outcomes, indicating that while speech acoustics are correlated with body‐size in human adult males, the cues provided are quite modest.