Objective: Prepubescent boys and girls share similar phonatory systems, yet listeners can often distinguish the voice gender. This study examines whether prepubescent voices carry sufficient sex-identifiable characteristics that allow listeners for accurate gender identification, and to investigate whether listeners can still correctly identify their true biological sex when the children imitate the voice of the opposite gender during reading. The present study offers insights into the key acoustic parameters related to gender identifiability in the voices of prepubescent children.

Methods / Design: Thirty prepubescent children (15 male, 15 female) aged 6 – 10 years were recruited. Each participant completed two reading tasks: (1) a standardized passage in their natural voice, and (2) imitating the voice of the opposite gender while reading the same passage. Acoustic signals were obtained in a quiet room using a 44.1 kHz sampling rate. Fifteen naïve listeners were recruited to perform a perceptual task, judging the perceived sex of the speakers. All audio signals were randomized and presented to the listeners. Acoustic parameters including fundamental frequency (F0), jitter, shimmer, spectral tilt (H1-H2), and cepstral peak prominence (CPP) were measured and compared.

Results: Preliminary findings indicated that listeners were able to identify speakers’ gender with accuracy significantly above chance. Acoustic analyses show significant differences between boys and girls in key parameters including F0, H1-H2, and CPP. These findings suggest that perceptible gender cues already exist in voices of children prior to anatomical differentiation of the laryngeal and vocal tract structures.

Conclusions:
This study appears to demonstrate that prepubescent voices exhibit perceptible gender characteristics even before puberty, both perceptually and acoustically.