Gender voice differences extend beyond pitch, resonance and even prosody
Q. The seven-year-old boy lay close to death, having lost most of his skin to a rare skin condition that affects 1 in every 20,000 babies born in the U.S. Today, he is back to school and playing soccer. What brought about this stunning reversal? A. When the child’s body rejected a skin graft from his father, his prognosis was bleak, reports Tina Hesman Saey in “Science News” magazine. “People with this condition are sometimes called ‘butterfly children’ because their skin is as fragile as the insect’s wings.” So even mild bumps can cause severe blistering, which in turn can affect mucus membranes inside the body, making breathing, swallowing and digesting food difficult. More than 40% of such children die before adolescence.
Surgeons turned to stemcell researcher Michele De Luca of the University of Modena, whose group had been successful in growing small patches of generepaired skin for kids with the same condition. Taking a small patch of the boy’s unblistered skin, they grew skin stem cells, used genetic engineering to repair the cells’ DNA, then grew large sheets of healthy skin in the lab.
Eight months and three grafting-surgeries later, that small number of corrected stem cells had replenished the skin, and the boy was released from the hospital. Q. We can generally tell whether a speaker is male or female by voice alone – on a phone call, for example. Pitch (higher in women) and resonance (deeper in men) are important indicators, stemming primarily from vocal anatomy differences. But they’re not the whole story. What are some other, more subtle cues? A. Beyond pitch and resonance is prosody (the fluctuations of pitch) and the emphasis and cadence of speech. The pitch of a woman’s voice changes continuously, in sing-song fashion, covering a frequency range about twice that of men, says speech-language pathologist Christie Block on the New York Speech and Voice Lab website. In comparison, men’s voices are monotone and louder.
And it’s not only the sound of speech which differs between men and women but also its content. Women are typically more polite and empathetic, less likely to interrupt, and more likely to disclose personal information and feelings. Women also ask more tag questions (“It’s nice out, isn’t it?”), which soften a declarative sentence. Research has established that the gender of a person using Twitter can be established with about 75% accuracy based solely on the content of a collection of their tweets.
Most of us are not consciously aware of these nuances. But for many transgender adults, mastering a new style of speaking is as important as any physical transformation. Q. How might it be true that “wax in your lugholes hides your filthy secrets,” as “New Scientist” magazine recently wrote? A. Besides waxy compounds that protect the ear canal and kill off bacteria, as well as bodily castoffs, cerumen (aka earwax) contains a unique chemical signature that could be used to extract plain old DNA, says the magazine’s Christie Wilcox. Engy Shokry and her Brazilian colleagues have used earwax “to detect drug and tobacco use and diagnose both types of diabetes.”
Earwax offers several advantages: Collection is more straightforward and less invasive than blood or urine samples and requires little processing to be analyzed. Also, because earwax builds up over time, tests on earwax can detect drugs up to three months after they’re taken, so they can be used for both short- and long-term monitoring.
Yet currently, using earwax as a diagnostic tool remains problematic since it lacks the centuries of data that exist for blood and urine samples. Says Sweden’s Craig Wheelock, “Normalizing it so that earwax is earwax is earwax will be a challenge.”
Concludes Wilcox, “For now, any confidential information will stay archived in your ear where nobody can get at it.”