Seven and up: individual diferences in male voice fundamental frequency emerge before puberty and remain stable throughout adulthood

(2016) Seven and up: individual differences in male voice fundamental frequency emerge before puberty and remain stable throughout adulthood. This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version. Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available. Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. and up: individual diferences in male voice fundamental frequency emerge before puberty and remain stable throughout adulthood. Voice pitch (the perceptual correlate of fundamental frequency, F0) varies considerably even among individuals of the same sex and age, communicating a host of socially and evolutionarily relevant information. However, due to the almost exclusive utilization of cross-sectional designs in previous studies, it remains unknown whether these individual differences in voice pitch emerge before, during or after sexual maturation, and whether voice pitch remains stable into adulthood. Here, we measured the F0 parameters of men who were recorded once every 7 years from age 7 to 56 as they participated in the British television documentary Up Series. Linear mixed models revealed significant effects of age on all F0 parameters, wherein F0 mean, minimum, maximum and the standard deviation of F0 showed sharp pubertal decreases between age 7 and 21, yet remained remarkably stable after age 28. Critically, men's pre-pubertal F0 at age 7 strongly predicted their F0 at every subsequent adult age, explaining up to 64% of the variance in post-pubertal F0. This finding suggests that between-individual differences in voice pitch that are known to play an important role in men's reproductive success are in fact largely determined by age 7, and may therefore be linked to prenatal and/or pre-pubertal androgen exposure.