Speaking fundamental frequency in cisgender and nonbinary speakers assigned female at birth

Previous research related to fundamental frequency (F0) across speakers has resulted in published norms for vocal pitch by age and sex, which are often used in the field of speech-language pathology to assess whether a person’s vocal pitch falls within this normative range. Due to both anatomical and socially learned factors, a large difference has been reported for male versus female speakers (e.g., Graddol and Swann, 1983; Hollien et al., 1997; Stoicheff, 1981). These studies, however, assumed either a sex or gender binary, as well as a normative alignment between sex and gender. The current study examines the average F0 of non-binary speakers assigned female at birth (AFAB, n = 15) and age-matched and cisgender women (n = 15). Speakers produced the first six sentences of the Rainbow Passage three times. By-sentence measures of average F0 will be extracted in Praat and used to better understand F0 distributions for each gender group. Based on previous literature showing that social factors affect F0, it is predicted that the average F0 of AFAB non-binary speakers will be lower than that cisgender women. Since F0 is the focus of gender-affirming voice therapy, these findings will contribute data on F0 values for non-binary clients.