15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


Sex-Specific Durational Differences in English and Swedish

Adrian P. Simpson (1), Christine Ericsdotter (2)

(1) University of Jena, Germany
(2) Stockholms Universitet, Sweden

Following a survey of sex-specific duration differences (restricted mainly to vowels) found in a number of languages, data from 48 speakers of American English and 9 speakers of Central Standard Swedish are investigated for sex-specific differences in segment duration. A set of complex patterns arise from the data. Greater female durations are mainly confined to places of prominence, greater male durations to consonantal material. Since differences in whole-utterance duration are found to be the exception, intra-utterance duration differences result from differences in temporal distribution.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Simpson, Adrian P. / Ericsdotter, Christine (2003): "Sex-specific durational differences in English and Swedish", In ICPhS-15, 1113-1116.