Publication Date
2-15-2024
Publication Name
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Auditory attribution of speaker gender has historically been assumed to operate within a binary framework. The prevalence of gender diversity and its associated sociophonetic variability motivates an examination of how listeners perceptually represent these diverse voices. Utterances from 30 transgender (1 agender individual, 15 non-binary individuals, 7 transgender men, and 7 transgender women) and 30 cisgender (15 men and 15 women) speakers were used in an auditory free classification paradigm, in which cisgender listeners classified the speakers on perceived general similarity and gender identity. Multidimensional scaling of listeners’ classifications revealed twodimensional solutions as the best fit for general similarity classifications. The first dimension was interpreted as masculinity/ femininity, where listeners organized speakers from high to low fundamental frequency and first formant frequency. The second was interpreted as gender prototypicality, where listeners separated speakers with fundamental frequency and first formant frequency at upper and lower extreme values from more intermediate values. Listeners’ classifications for gender identity collapsed into a one-dimensional space interpreted as masculinity/femininity. Results suggest that listeners engage in fine-grained analysis of speaker gender that cannot be adequately captured by a gender dichotomy. Further, varying terminology used in instructions may bias listeners’ gender judgements.
Volume
155
Issue
2
First Page
1422
Last Page
1436
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0024521
Included in
Cognition and Perception Commons, Cognitive Science Commons, Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics Commons
Comments
This open access articles was published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. A popular media synopsis of this work was published in Scilight (https://doi.org/10.1063/10.0024759). The first author was interviewed about this work on Across Acoustics, the official podcast of the Acoustical Society of America (https://acrossacoustics.buzzsprout.com/1537384/14466368).