Abstract
In this pilot study we investigated the vocal strategies of Cantonese women when addressing an attractive vs. unattractive male. We recruited 19 young female native speakers of Hong Kong Cantonese who completed an attractiveness rating task, followed by a speech production task where they were presented a subset of the same faces. By comparing the rating results and corresponding acoustic data of the facial stimuli, we found that when young Cantonese women spoke to an attractive male, they were less breathy, lower in fundamental frequency, and with denser formants, all of which are considered to project a larger body. Participants who were more satisfied with their own height used these vocal strategies more actively. These results are discussed in terms of the body size projection principle.
Highlights
Having an attractive voice is useful because listeners tend to associate it with an attractive face (Hughes and Miller, 2016), a likeable personality (Zuckerman and Driver, 1989), and assign it higher health ratings (Albert et al, 2021)
Our data seem to suggest that female Cantonese speakers have the same set of vocal strategies for attractive vs. unattractive mates, it is those who are confident in their own height that are using them more actively. This pilot study has found that young Cantonese women projected a large-sounding voice when speaking to an attractive male face
This seems to disagree with the widely held body size projection principle which states that an attractive female voice is small-sounding
Summary
Having an attractive voice is useful because listeners tend to associate it with an attractive face (Hughes and Miller, 2016), a likeable personality (Zuckerman and Driver, 1989), and assign it higher health ratings (Albert et al, 2021). It has been reported that physical attractiveness leads to advantages in situations such as dating (Berscheid et al, 1971), job applications (Watkins and Johnston, 2000), promotion (Chung and Leung, 1988), elections (Jäckle et al, 2020), and is associated with more social support (Sarason et al, 1985). This study approached this lesser-studied aspect of vocal attractiveness by studying how Cantonese women from Hong Kong choose their vocal strategies when addressing attractive vs. unattractive men
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