Sex Differences in Vocal Tract Length Shift the Formants
The filter-side half of the sex difference, kept separate from the source-side half on purpose: puberty lengthens the folds and also lowers the larynx, and those are two different changes with two different acoustic consequences. Teaching them as one node would re-merge source and filter immediately after the path worked to separate them. This is also why the seed paper's formant measures carry a sex effect independent of its pitch measures.
Questions this Concept answers
- Why are the pubertal change in the vocal folds and the pubertal change in tract length taught as two separate effects?
Speaker effects in language comprehension: An integrative model of language and speaker processing
Voice production is split into a laryngeal source, whose vocal-fold vibration sets fundamental frequency, and a vocal-tract filter, whose resonances are the formants. Because men have longer vocal tr…