Sex-specific durational difference

Following a survey of sex-specific duration differences (restricted mainly to vowels) found in a number of lan-guages, data from 48 speakers of American English and 9 speakers of Central Standard Swedish are in-vestigated for sex-specific differences in segment dura-tion. 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 distribu-tion.