engleski

Vocal changes across the menstrual cycle: Are we there yet?

Previous studies showed that human voice provides a source of biologically important information, such as body size, age, fluctuating asymmetry and facial attractiveness. It is also assumed that female voice provides cues of ovulation. In line with this, female voice attractiveness increases with the conception risk across the menstrual cycle, which indicates that certain acoustic characteristics change across the cycle. Previous attempts to identify exact acoustic ovulatory cues produced inconsistent findings. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate vocal characteristics in different phases of menstrual cycle. Vocal samples from 48 naturally cycling women and 20 women who were using hormonal contraceptives were collected during menstrual, late follicular (confirmed by using urine test for luteinizing hormone surge) and luteal phases. The analysis of vowel samples from women with natural cycle revealed marginally significant decrease in pitch variability and an increase in minimum pitch values in late follicular phase, as well as lower voice intensity in luteal phase. There were no changes in vocal characteristics across the cycle among women using hormonal contraceptives. Also, this group of women had lower formant dispersion compared to naturally cycling women. In addition, two groups of women differed in noise to harmonics ratio when compared in menstrual and late follicular phase. Taking into an account small effect sizes found in our study, we propose several explanations for these findings, which might serve as an incentive for future research.

voice; menstrual cycle; ovulation cues

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