Female Speech Research Articles

Gender and speech material effects on the long-term average speech spectrum, including at extended high frequencies.

Gender and language effects on the long-term average speech spectrum (LTASS) have been reported, but typically using recordings that were bandlimited and/or failed to accurately capture extended high frequencies (EHFs). Accurate characterization of the full-band LTASS is warranted given recent data on the contribution of EHFs to speech perception. The present study characterized the LTASS for high-fidelity, anechoic recordings of males and females producing Bamford-Kowal-Bench sentences, digits, and unscripted narratives. Gender had an effect on spectral levels at both ends of the spectrum: males had higher levels than females below approximately 160 Hz, owing to lower fundamental frequencies; females had ∼4 dB higher levels at EHFs, but this effect was dependent on speech material. Gender differences were also observed at ∼300 Hz, and between 800 and 1000 Hz, as previously reported. Despite differences in phonetic content, there were only small, gender-dependent differences in EHF levels across speech materials. EHF levels were highly correlated across materials, indicating relative consistency within talkers. Our findings suggest that LTASS levels at EHFs are influenced primarily by talker and gender, highlighting the need for future research to assess whether EHF cues are more audible for female speech than for male speech.

Gender Identity Lexicon as An Object of Translation

Gender lexical units occupy a special place in modern linguistics. There should also be specific approach to enriching the language of the work of art, giving the image of heroes, in the translation of the gender marked lexicon used by the authors. Words and phrases in the original text, which are common in male and female speeches, are also included. This article mainly describes gender identity lexicon as well as the differentiation of gendered expressive lexical units by researchers. In addition, in the translation of works of art, some thoughts are expressed on the issue of gender-component lexicon.

Lexical Hedges in Female Speech: An Analysis of Contemporary Talk Show

Lexical Hedges in Female Speech: An Analysis of Contemporary Talk Show

The multilingual digits-in-noise (DIN) test: development and evaluation

Objective To develop a methodologically uniform digits-in-noise (DIN) test in 17 different languages. Design The DIN test was developed for Android devices as an extension to the open-access Hearing Test™ app, available on the Google Play store. It utilised professionally recorded female speech, speech-shaped noise, a digit scoring method and a variable step size. The test was adaptively optimised and evaluated as the results of tests taken online by users of the app became available. Study sample Optimisation using 35,534 ears, evaluation using 6012 ears. Results Optimisation improved the slopes of the psychometric functions for all languages by an average of 6.8%/dB. Evaluation included calculation of normative speech reception thresholds (SRTs) and estimation of test-retest standard deviations. Normative values for SRTs ranged from −14.2 dB SNR (95% CI −14.3 to −14.0) for Chinese to −11.2 dB SNR (95% CI −11.3 to −11.1) for Japanese, with reliability estimates ranging from 0.48 dB (95% CI 0.36–0.64) for Portuguese to 0.91 dB (95% CI 0.73–1.21) for Romanian. Conclusions The optimisation of each language version was confirmed by the improvement in the slopes of the psychometric functions. The normative values obtained from the test evaluation were in agreement with literature data. Trial Registration Science Support Centre of Wroclaw Medical University BW-59/2020

Female Existentialism in Monkey Grip by Helen Garner

This study aimed to analyze female existentialism in Helen Garner's "Monkey Grip" using a descriptive qualitative method. In this context, the data obtained were carefully reviewed, presented, and analyzed through stylistic analysis. The results showed that female existentialism was expressed in two patterns. Firstly, the female speech was similar to the male, accompanied by the open expression of sexual desires and male circle words. Secondly, female actions contained the feminine movement to overcome discrimination problems and interact with many males. The results showed that the female character was considered a feminist representative against male stereotypes.

‘Men More Polite Than Women?': Gender Differences Study of Bimanese Interaction in Requesting

This study examines gender differences in request speech and politeness, focusing on how men and women use different linguistic strategies to convey requests politely. This study aims to analyze the alerter and supporting speech elements in request speech in the Bima language as spoken by male and female students. It also compares the request speech elements used by men and women. Using a qualitative approach, the data analyzed consists of request utterances in the Bima language. Data were collected through recording techniques and discourse completion tests. The data analysis involved categorizing the speech elements as units of analysis, focusing on alerter and supporting elements, and classifying them based on Blum-Kulka’s framework. The analysis revealed that male speech tended to demonstrate familiarity with the interlocutor through the varied use of alerter greetings, while female speech showed politeness by employing supporting speech. This difference indicates that men are more inclined to use positive politeness strategies, whereas women tend to use negative politeness strategies.

Do you say uh or uhm? A cross-linguistic approach to filler particle use in heritage and majority speakers across three languages.

Filler particles like uhm in English or ähm in German show subtle language-specific differences and their variation in form is related to socio-linguistic variables like gender. The use of fillers in a second language has been shown to differ from monolinguals' filler particle use in both frequency and form in different language contexts. This study investigates the language-specific use of filler particles by bilingual heritage speakers in both their languages, looking at the dominant majority language in the society and their minority heritage language spoken at home. This is done based on heritage Russian and German data and majority German and English data from the RUEG corpus. Language-specific fillers were extracted from the corpus and analyzed for their occurrence and segmental form. The frequency analysis suggests an influence of bilingualism, age group, and formality of the situation on the filler frequency across all languages. The number of filler particles is higher in formal, older, and bilingual speech. The form analysis reveals an effect of language and gender on the type of filler particle. The vocalic-nasal filler particles (e.g., uhm) are more frequently found in German and English and in female speech of these languages. Heritage speakers of Russian in contact with German and English show higher use of vocalic-nasal forms also in their Russian while producing similar gender related patterns to monolingual speakers in both their languages. The higher frequency of filler particles in formal situations, older speakers and in bilingual speech, is discussed related to cognitive load which is assumed to be higher in these contexts while speech style which differs between situations and social groups is also considered as explanation. The higher use of vocalic-nasal filler particles in German and English suggests language specific filler particle preferences also related to the socio-linguistic variable gender in these languages. The results from heritage speakers suggest and influence on filler particle form in their heritage language, while also revealing socio-linguistic usage patterns related to gender which are produced by heritage speakers similarly to monolinguals in their respective language.

The female nomination on the basis of marital status in Russian Internet texts: functional and linguo-ecological aspects

The article is devoted to the gendered lexical unit which constitutes initial abbreviation derived from the idiom «razvedenka s pricepom» (divorsed woman with a child) and is actively used by Russian speaking Internet users to denote a female person on the basis of her marital status. The article describes the history of the appearance of the unit, its derivational and semantical characteristics, semantic and contextual connections and its functioning specifics in the Internet texts. The research is conducted on the material of the author's corpus of the contexts of use including 1 255 speech products published in between 2014 and 2023 in the communicative space of such social platforms as (425 units), vk.com (336 units), YouTube (190 units), Yandex.Dzen (173 units). The author applies the methods of quantative, semantic, conceptual, derivational, contextual and discursive analyses. The article specifies that the gendered abbreviation is derived from the linguocynical idiom, having been used in the male speech long before the spread of the Internet. The research reveals that the abbreviation use underlines the artifact conceptual metaphor generated by the initial phraseological combination. The divorced mother deanimization is regularly strengthened by the abrriviation's contextual environment. It reveals that 1 175 contexts (93,62 %) contain verbalized speaker's conception of financial aspect in sexual, romantic or family relationship caused by the actualization of consumer strategy in interpersonal ineteraction and by the ubiquitous consumeristic philosophy. It proves that the use of the innovation RSP is a feature of male Internet users' speech (982 contexts; 78,24 %) and is not typical for female speech (270 contexts; 21,51 %). In female speech the abbreviation carries out primarily the metalinguistic function and much less frequently nominative and evaluative functions. In the Internet texts produced by male persons the nomination not only promotes expressing the divorced mother with a child negative evaluation but also facilitates deconstruction, deaxiologization and desacralization of the concept «Mother». This allows us to qualify the abbreviation as a linguo-perversion which is a special kind of language trauma which represents a speech phenomenon generating the traditional symbol ambivalence and leading towards worldview destruction.

A Systematic Evaluation of Adversarial Attacks against Speech Emotion Recognition Models

Speech emotion recognition (SER) has been constantly gaining attention in recent years due to its potential applications in diverse fields and thanks to the possibilities offered by deep learning technologies. However, recent studies have shown that deep learning models can be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we systematically assess this problem by examining the impact of various adversarial white-box and black-box attacks on different languages and genders within the context of SER. We first propose a suitable methodology for audio data processing, feature extraction, and convolutional neural network long short-term memory (CNN-LSTM) architecture. The observed outcomes highlighted the considerable vulnerability of CNN-LSTM models to adversarial examples (AEs). In fact, all the considered adversarial attacks are able to considerably reduce the performance of the constructed models. Furthermore, when assessing the efficacy of the attacks, minor differences were noted between the languages analyzed as well as between male and female speech. In summary, this work contributes to the understanding of the robustness of CNN-LSTM models, particularly in SER scenarios, and the impact of AEs. Interestingly, our findings serve as a baseline for (a) developing more robust algorithms for SER, (b) designing more effective attacks, (c) investigating possible defenses, (d) improved understanding of the vocal differences between different languages and genders, and (e) overall enhancing our comprehension of the SER task.

Discourse analysis of male and female representatives of selected countries at the United Nations general debates

Abstract The aim of this paper was to evaluate gender differences in the language used in United Nations (UN) General Assembly debates by one male and one female representative each from India, China, the USA, and Indonesia. The critical discourse analysis (CDA) framework of van Dijk (2015) was used along with the 25 discursive devices in this framework. The data on frequencies of variables were analysed statistically. No significant differences were observed between positive comments about oneself, negative comments about others, length of speech (in words), and the various devices by the gender of the speaker at the 0.05 level of significance. However, gender differences in terms of higher levels for males than for females were observed for populism (t(6) = 2.354, p = .057), norm expression (t(6) = 2.171, p = 0.073), and positive comments about oneself (t(6) = 2.224, p = .068). The correlation coefficients were significant between genders for positive-self, norm expression, and national self-glorification only. These results could be attributed to the small size of four male and four female speeches, leading to high values of standard error, which reflects the significance of differences. Also, there could be overlapping and mixing of gender characteristics in connection with different contexts and occasions due to emergent identities. These political identities were created in particular situations or contexts, and it was not clear how much they could be a result of female or male politicians’ styles. This explanation by Sivrić and Jurčić (2014) seems to be valid for this research as well. Small samples could be a limitation of this study. However, many other works used even smaller samples. The generalisability of these findings needs to be tested using other similar studies.

‘My Tongue Will tell the anger of my heart’: Revisiting Female Speech and Silence in Shakespeare

‘My Tongue Will tell the anger of my heart’: Revisiting Female Speech and Silence in Shakespeare

INTONATION ORGANIZATION OF COMPLIMENT AND FLATTERY SPEECH ACTS IN ENGLISH FILM DISCOURSE

The article focuses on intonation characteristics of compliment and flattery speech acts in English-language film discourse. Since the intonation-prosodic arrangement of the discourse is determined by its pragmatic intention, the article dwells on the illocutionary aims of the addressees of compliment and flattery speech acts. The main illocutionary aims of compliment speech act are seen as the intention to please, or encourage the addressee, the intention to release one’s emotions, the intention to express gratitude to the addressee for certain actions of his, and the intention to calm down and encourage the addressee, to save his “face”. The main illocutionary aims perceived by flatterers are the desire to disguise flattery as a sincere praise or compliment; the intention to gain benefit and the intention to force the addressee into taking actions, seen as beneficial for the speaker. The carried out auditory and electroacoustic analyses of the intonation of compliments and flattery enabled the author to identify certain common tendences in terms of melodical contour: both speech acts are characterized by the predominant use of falling nuclear tone and falling tone movement. Compliments are framed with The Descending Stepping Head or The Ascending Head, while flattery is characterized by a greater variability of pre-nuclear patterns than compliments: apart from The Descending Stepping Head, The Ascending Head, The Level Head and The Sliding Head are used. Compliments are also characterized by a high pitch level. The pitch of flattering utterances is more varied: it is qualified as high in half of the phrases, medium or low in the rest of the phrases. The pitch level of compliment phrases is medium in male speech and narrow in female speech. Phrases of flattery are pronounced on a high pitch level. The voice range of flattering phrases is medium, which makes the speaker sound smarmy and wheedling. The loudness of both compliment and flattery is increased, and the pace is slowed down, except for women who utter compliments: they speak faster.

Impact of Communication Filters on the Speeches of Female Yoruba and Igbo Speakers

Differences in the ways that men and women use language have long been of interest in the study of discourse and sociolinguistics. Despite extensive theorizing, actual empirical investigations have yet to converge on a coherent picture of gender differences in language. The male/female sex biological categories are assumed to have a bearing on the masculine/feminine gender social categories. This categorization is assumed to affect almost every aspect of human living, including the use of language by the different genders. This work is a study of works and assumptions on sex-conditioned language or genderlect, with special attention on the characteristics of female speech. This aspect identified the observed linguistic filtering devices in female speech in an attempt to establish them as stereotypes. The study further attempted a survey of filtered female speech and established pragmatic bases for the models. A clear attempt was made to identify and classify the semantic constraints inherent in the connotative properties of the utterances of some female speakers of the English, Igbo and Yoruba languages while also attempting a possible literal and contextual interpretation of the utterances and the possible 'misunderstandings' that may arise from the 'filtered' utterances. Oral discussions and unobtrusive observations were conducted to get data related to the manifestation of genderlect in female speech. The findings affirmed the thesis of differences in gender speech styles.

English

Wireless communication has become increasingly popular in recent years due to its mobility, portability and efficient service. Quality Voice Communication is the basic need of all such devices. Due to the significant spectrum demand, the bandwidth allocated to Professional Radio devices is decreasing. This results in lowering voice/ speech quality. Due to limited bandwidth, the design of Radio is changing. The main change is shifting from Analogue signal processing to Digital signal processing of speech and radio signals. The conversion of analogue-natured speech to digital form itself creates loss and faithfulness. Such Radio includes a voice coder for analogue to digital conversion of speech. Human spoken language, speaker (male or female), and pronunciation play an essential role in direct voice and Radio communication. It is the primary object which decides the design of low bandwidth coder. This paper deals with Marathi language characteristics and the interdependence of language constructs that affects voice/speech quality. In this paper, we extracted features of the Marathi language using PRAAT software and analyzed its constructs using statistical tools. The actual testing on Radio is carried out. The speech quality observed during such testing is correlated with statistical results. It is shown that the standard deviation in pitch and formants in male speech is less (average 35%) compared to the standard deviation in pitch and formants in female speech. This results in lowering the quality of male speech compared to female speech. It is also shown that some vowels and combinations of certain vowels and consonants produce poor speech quality compared to others.

Duration Patterns of Chinese Syllables in Commercial and Social Oral Advertisements

Information structure of an utterance is one of the key factors determining phonological unit realization patterns including the duration which is manifested differently in males and females. This article examines the influence of information load and gender on the Chinese syllable duration in commercial and social advertising discourse. The material was taken from the texts of commercial and social oral advertising produced by 6 professional speakers (3 males, 3 females). The measurements were performed in Praat on the syllables with identical phonemics and the same lexical tones occurring both on informative (previously classified as such by a minimum of 6 out of 10 listeners) and uninformative (the remaining) utterance parts. The results show that duration is one of the most important markers of a syllable information load. In both commercial and social advertisements, in over 50 % of cases informative syllables’ duration was longer than that of uninformative ones. The difference was not large but rather consistent. It means that not only duration is involved in manifesting the utterance information structure but other prosodic parameters as well. Another finding was gender difference: 1) on the whole, syllables in female speech have longer duration than in male; 2) males use the duration technique more effectively than females: the contrast between loaded and unloaded syllables is higher

A novel smart photoelectric lock system: Speech transmitted by laser and speech to text

We propose a circuit that modulates a speech signal to a laser, using which the speech signal can be transmitted using the laser. Also, it shows the use of a platform based on embedded ARM (Advanced RISC Machine), running a small deep learning model based on TDNN (Time delay neural network) and LSTM (Long short-term memory), and converting speech to text, and use the text cipher for unlocking. This research implements a smart lock system that can set a pre-record speech cipher and verify the similarity through a laser transmission speech cipher to unlock it. In our experiment result, the English speech of laser transmission can reach a WER (Word error rate) of 14.06% through the deep learning model to recognize the content of the speech cipher. We also design a similarity comparison algorithm based on LCS (Longest common subsequence) to compare the character set of the laser transmission speech compare and the prerecord speech cipher to calculate the similarity rate. Through the similarity comparison algorithm, when the WER is 27.27%, the male speech samples used in this study still have a 95% unlocking success rate, while the female speech samples have a 100% unlocking success rate. Compared with only using automatic speech recognition (ASR) to unlock, the method we propose is to compare the similarity of the content of speech cipher. The method significantly improves the unlocking fault tolerance of using lasers to transmit audio. Therefore, by using the laser to transmit the speech cipher, the usability of the photoelectric smart lock system has been significantly improved. At the same time, the characteristics of the laser are not easy to eavesdrop on the cipher, which can also improve security.

A Deep Learning Method Using Gender-Specific Features for Emotion Recognition.

Speech reflects people's mental state and using a microphone sensor is a potential method for human-computer interaction. Speech recognition using this sensor is conducive to the diagnosis of mental illnesses. The gender difference of speakers affects the process of speech emotion recognition based on specific acoustic features, resulting in the decline of emotion recognition accuracy. Therefore, we believe that the accuracy of speech emotion recognition can be effectively improved by selecting different features of speech for emotion recognition based on the speech representations of different genders. In this paper, we propose a speech emotion recognition method based on gender classification. First, we use MLP to classify the original speech by gender. Second, based on the different acoustic features of male and female speech, we analyze the influence weights of multiple speech emotion features in male and female speech, and establish the optimal feature sets for male and female emotion recognition, respectively. Finally, we train and test CNN and BiLSTM, respectively, by using the male and the female speech emotion feature sets. The results show that the proposed emotion recognition models have an advantage in terms of average recognition accuracy compared with gender-mixed recognition models.

THE INFLUENCE OF GENDER FACTOR ON THE SPEECH BEHAVIOR OF COMMUNICANTS

The article is devoted to the analysis of the influence of gender factor on the speech behavior of communicants. With the emergence of gender linguistics, the range of scientific interests in linguistics is significantly expanding. Stereotypes of femininity and masculinity, gender asymmetries, as well as peculiarities of speech and communication behavior of men and women are studied in more detail. In our research we are guided by the fact that gender is a general scientific category that explains the behavior of men and women based on biological sex and in relation to the social and cultural norms of a particular society. The main method of research is contrastive analysis, which makes it possible to compare and distinguish the differential features of male and female speech. The study of communicative behavior is carried out on the basis of discourse analysis. The heuristic method which involves the collection of previously recorded research material is also applied. The research material is the works of the modern English authors M. Dunn “Ex-Girlfriends United” and J. Kaplan “The Men I Didn’t Marry”. The analysis of the characteristics of male and female speech behavior makes it possible to conclude that there are generally accepted typical characteristics of the speech behavior of men and women in every society based on moral and ethical norms, as well as cultural characteristics. They can vary depending on a number of other factors other than biological features: mental composition, character, profession, role in society, status, type of temperament, etc. Since society imposes certain rules and standards of behavior of men and women on individuals, it is necessary to be aware of these features and take them into account in the process of communication.

The Power of Female Speech in two Medieval Tales: A Comparative Study

The story has been a fundamental vehicle for teaching throughout history, especially during the medieval period. Two enlightening medieval collections of stories are the eastern The Arabian Nights and the western Lais of Marie de France. Several Comparative Literature programs teach these two literary works in their courses. The tales within these collections function for the two female storytellers, Scheherazade and Marie de France, to educate their political authorities through the positive influence of their speech. This paper examines the power of speech in convincing Medieval rulers to change their attitudes toward women. Throughout these two collections of stories, we find several types of indirect persuasive methods of speech, such as cause and effect, logic, evidence, seduction and emotion, used by the characters to have a positive effect on their audience. The target of the paper is to discover how these two female storytellers make use of the duality of speech and quick convention in a way that supports their efforts to change a powerful ruler’s attitude toward women and to convince him that speech, in general, and women’s speech, in particular, are valuable things.

Ревизия классики украинской зарубежной лингвистики: гендерная проблематика в системе взглядов Юрия Шевелева (на материале статьи Über die Besonderheiten der Sprache der Frauen)

It is typical of the modern linguistic study to reconsider the classical heritage, which makes it possible to observe the dynamics of linguistic processes and the movement vector of scientific thought, as well as to track the problems that still need to be solved nowadays. Such problems include linguistic genderology issues, in particular the description of female speech. In this regard, the little-known German-language research of Yuri Sherekh (Shevelev) Über die Besonderheiten der Sprache der Frauen (1952), which outlines the specificity of female speech at almost all language levels, appears to be of great value. This piece of research remains relevant since it makes it possible to compare the female speech features from different historical periods as well as to rethink the data on the manifestation of conservatism, archaism, negative attitude towards assimilation processes, etc. in female speech, to see the dynamics of the female linguistic worldview and the development of femininity. It seems reasonable enough to state that Shevelev laid the foundation for: 1) a comparative study of gender issues based on the Slavic languages; 2) historical and dialectal gender linguistics of the Ukrainian language; 3) national Ukrainian linguistic genderology, manifested at the level of national linguistic consciousness; 4) the study of gender opposing linguistic worldviews; 5) considering the level manifestation of gender characteristics in linguistic systems.