Quickie: Want to Turn a Woman On? Try Mumbling.

Study shows women find speech intelligibility sexy

Women want their partners to speak to them, but according to research in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, the less they understand what their man is actually saying, the more attractive he will seem.

But how could that be? After all, isn’t communication the cornerstone of any relationship?

“From a sexual selection standpoint, males with traits that are slightly more masculine than average are typically preferred….”

It turns out, researchers at the American Institute of Physics found that the more a man mumbles, the more attractive women will find him — a preference that is deeply embedded in our evolutionary roots.

“From a sexual selection standpoint, males with traits that are slightly more masculine than average are typically preferred, which in this context would make males with less clear speech more attractive,” explained researcher Daniel Stehr.

In their study, Stehr and his colleagues had 42 people record a variety of speech tasks, and different pools of participants listened to the vocal samples and rated them based on their perceived attractiveness. They found that overwhelmingly, the less speech intelligibility a man had in the recording, the more women found him attractive.

Oddly enough, although women may be hardwired to find mumbling men attractive, this trait is also associated with characteristics that are not as desirable evolutionarily speaking.

“Lower perceived clarity is associated with a range of speech motor disorders, suggesting a lack of clarity may also have indicated the presence of disease to our ancestors,” said Stehr.

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Source:

Men who mumble a turn-on for women? Voice study says it’s true. Study Finds. https://www.studyfinds.org/men-who-mumble-a-turn-on/