#2 by I'm With Stupid » Jan 14, 2019 5:41 am
You'd have to establish a difference between men and women's intonation before we could speculate about the causes. From what I've read into the subject, intonation is an exceptionally difficult area to study. I'm an English teacher, and there used to be a lot of "rise-fall intonation shows surprise" kind of advice. But the limited amount of research in this area suggests that a lot of that is very culturally based, and there are quite big differences in this function of intonation between different English-speaking communities. So my initial thoughts would be that any male-female differences would be culturally based and localised within social groups.
The only thing I would suggest with a fair degree of confidence is that on average women's tonal range is at a higher pitch for biological reasons. I don't know of any research suggesting that they actually speak with a greater range between the highs and lows. Certainly some people speak with a greater range than others, and everyone can increase their tonal range if the situation requires it (public speaking, for example, or being polite on the phone).
So there might be some interesting differences between men and women's speech in individual languages, and within particular groups within those languages, but there are clearly also intrinsic differences between men and women's speech that applies to all language, which is why you could pretty accurately determine if a man or woman is speaking on a recording, even if it's in a language you don't know. On the other hand, if I was to ask you to determine whether an American speaker was white or black, you'd have to rely entirely on your knowledge of typical vernaculars for these groups, so it would obviously be far less reliable, and your powers would disappear completely as soon as you were asked to do the same task in a language you don't know.