Are female voices more intelligible than male voices?
Florien J. Koopmans-van Beinum, Mirjam T. J. Tielen · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1987
Studies on the intelligibility of female compared to male voices, and studies on the relation between acoustic parameters (such as F0) and speech understanding are rather scarce and indirect. However, particularly in information-providing services, female voices are frequently used, whereas, in speech-technology applications, they are often excluded, probably due to inadequate methods for analyzing female voices. In order to study the relative intelligibility of male and female voices, ten male and ten female speakers were asked to read three phonotactically balanced lists of 50 CVC combinations. Special care was taken with respect to speech level, signal-to-noise ratio, and presentation method using: equivalent peak level, babble noise, and a variation of the Nakatani and Dukes method. For a small number of trained listeners, the intelligibility threshold per speaker is established, providing 20 measuring points per listener. Furthermore, word and phoneme intelligibility per speaker are measured with phonetically balanced sentences and words, at a fixed S/N ratio.