July 9, 2007 — Whether or not women really talk more than men, there may be one sure way to level the verbal playing field — fasting. The longer a woman fasts, the lower her voice gets and the less she uses it, according to Lebanese speech researchers who made use of Ramadan fasts to study how voices changed in 28 healthy women.
"The subjects were tested when they were not fasting and while fasting after the first week of intermittent fasting during Ramadan," report Abdul-Latif Hamdan, Abla Sibai and Charcel Rameh of American University of Beirut. Their study appears in the July issue of Journal of Voice.
All of the women had their voices acoustically analyzed and their larynxes inspected by video-endostroboscopy. They were also asked to describe how easy or difficult it was to speak.
The biggest complaint, made by 23 of the women, was that it was simply harder to say anything while fasting. About half of the women also reported vocal fatigue, which also tended to reduce the amount they said. The next most common symptom was a lowering of the voice, which was seen in one-fifth of the fasting women. A few of the women also showed some harshening of their voices as well.
The bottom line, say the researchers: "Fasting affects voice." More specifically, dehydration affects voice, since these Ramadan fasting includes refraining from liquids as well as food.
