Effects of humanness and gender in voice processing

International audienceWhen we observe a producible human movement, the brain performs a specific perception-action matching process, which possibly facilitates perceptual processing. In this work, we wanted to study whether the producibility of a sound affects the speed at which it is categorized. Participants were presented with isolated sounds either sung by a natural male or female voice (“producible”) or distorted by saturation (“non-producible”) and had to categorize them as produced by a voice or by a machine. We analyzed reaction-time variations as a function of the gender and humanness of the voice. Results corroborate the existence of a "human bias" in auditory perception, and suggest a processing-speed asymmetry between natural female and male voices