Speech tempo: an honest signal for selecting mate for reproduction?
Résumé
Humans vary in how they produce speech, and those differences can depend on a number of factors such as geographical origin, mood, education, gender, age, etc. As for speech tempo (i.e. speaking rate, that is articulation rate including pauses), researchers have long recognized that variation in speech rate is a way, among others, of marking individual speaker characteristics and telling something about psychological traits of personality and affective state. With regard to gender, most available evidence suggests that men actually speak somewhat faster than women do (Terrango, 1966; Lutz and Mallard, 1986; Byrd, 1994; Block and Killen, 1996; Whiteside, 1996; Fitzsimmons et al., 2001; Robb et al., 2004; Yuan et al., 2006). Moreover, because of the inverted correlation existing between speech velocity and articulatory precision (Delattre, 1959), women articulation occurs to be more precise, that is closer to the ideal phonological targets of a given language (Lindblom, 1963). In the frame of sociolinguistics, it has previously been claimed that women use of formal forms is due to their strong investment in language transmission (Labov, 1966). Indeed, according to language acquisition theory, this parameter has been interpreted as a way of tuning maternal speech clarity with infant speech perception performance (Huei-Mei Liu et al., 2003). In the Darwinian framework, the honest signal hypothesis of sexual selection assumes that human choose their partners according to signals that indicate their qualities (Zahavi 1977; Clutton-Brock & Albon 1979; Johnstone 1995). Formal models have suggested that acoustic signals are likely to provide human with honest information on the quality, or condition of the signaler especially his age, body size and, last but not least, facility to reproduce (Loredana, et al., 2000; Neiman and Applegate, 1990; Ryan, et al., 1974; Horii, and Ryan, 1981; Mulac and Giles, 1996; Braun, 1996; Lass et al., 1980; Künzel, 1989; van Domelen and Moxness, 1995; Collins, 2000; Varosanec-Skaric 1999; Hughes et al. 2004; Feinberg et al. 2005). In humans, voice pitch is thought to be a cue of underlying quality and an important criterion for mate choice as, generally speaking, women are attracted to men with deep voices partly because this is an auditory cue linked to testosterone level, a hormone associated with male phenotypic quality (Apicella et al., 2007). Reversely, it has been revealed that female high-pitched voices alert men as to their prospective mate's fertility and health (Vukovic, et al., 2010). From the perspective of the honest signal theory, the present study was conducted to detect the existence of a relationship between speech tempo and men's preference for either dating or setting up a family with fast vs. slow speaking women. We postulate that men tend to be attracted by slow speaking women when they intend to reproduce themselves insofar they Some important implications for sexual communication are discussed.
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