Fung et al., JASA-EL (original) (raw)
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The development of gendered speech in children: Insights from adult L1 and L2 perceptions
JASA Express Letters, 2021
Past studies have shown that boys and girls sound distinct by 4 years old, long before sexual dimorphisms in vocal anatomy develop. These gender differences are thought to be learned within a particular speech community. However, no study has asked whether listeners' sensitivity to gender in child speech is modulated by language experience. This study shows that gendered speech emerges at 2.5 years old, and that L1 listeners outperform L2 listeners in detecting these differences. The findings highlight the role of language-specific sociolinguistic factors in both speech perception and production, and show that gendered speech emerges earlier than previously suggested.
Perceptual and acoustic gender differences in the speech of 4 1/2 - 5 1/2 year old children
1997
The linguistic factors which identify a speaker as being either male or female are reasonably well understood and documented when we are considering adult speakers. Many of these factors become apparent at puberty when the sexes diverge along predictable anatomical and physiological paths. It might be expected, therefore, that prepubertal children should appear relatively undifferentiated in terms of gender and that young boys' and girls' speech should be sexually homogenous. This study has confirmed, however, that adult listeners can correctly identify the sex of a prepubertal child from samples of speech. Results of the present study yielded correct identification rates which varied between 66% (using isolated vowels as the sample) and 76% (using sentences as the sample) - all of these rates were significantly greater than chance. Girls were shown to be better identified by listeners than boys and female listeners tended to be more accurate at identifying gender than male ...
Perceptual and Acoustic CorreLates of Gender in the Prepubertal Voice
Interspeech 2017, 2017
This study investigates the perceptual and acoustic correlates of gender in the prepubertal voice. 23 German-speaking primary school pupils (13 female, 10 male) aged 8-9 years were recorded producing 10 sentences each. Two sentences from each speaker were presented in random order to a group of listeners who were asked to assign a gender to each stimulus. Single utterances from each of the three male and three female speakers whose gender was identified most reliably were played in a second experiment to two further groups of listeners who judged each stimulus against seven perceptual attribute pairs. Acoustic analysis of those parameters corresponding most directly to the perceptual attributes revealed a number of highly significant correlations, indicating some aspects of the voice and speech (f0, harmonics-to-noise ratio, tempo) that children use to construct and adults use to identify gender in the prepubertal voice.
Listeners’ Ability to Identify the Gender of Preadolescent Children in Different Linguistic Contexts
Interspeech 2019
This study evaluated listeners' ability to identify the gender of preadolescent children from speech samples of varying length and linguistic context. The listeners were presented with a total of 190 speech samples in four different categories of linguistic context: segments, words, sentences, and discourse. The listeners were instructed to evaluate each speech sample and decide whether the speaker was a male or female and rate their level of confidence in their decision. Results showed listeners identified the gender of the speakers with a high degree of accuracy, ranging from 86% to 95%. Significant differences in listener judgments were found across the four levels of linguistic context, with segments having the lowest accuracy (83%) and discourse the highest accuracy (99%). At the segmental level, the listeners' identification of each speaker's gender was greater for vowels than for fricatives, with both types of phoneme being identified at a rate well above chance. Significant differences in identification were found between the /s/ and /ʃ/ fricatives, but not between the four corner vowels. The perception of gender is likely multifactorial, with listeners possibly using phonetic, prosodic, or stylistic speech cues to determine a speaker's gender.
Audio-Visual Perception of Gender by Infants Emerges Earlier for Adult-Directed Speech
PloS one, 2017
Early multisensory perceptual experiences shape the abilities of infants to perform socially-relevant visual categorization, such as the extraction of gender, age, and emotion from faces. Here, we investigated whether multisensory perception of gender is influenced by infant-directed (IDS) or adult-directed (ADS) speech. Six-, 9-, and 12-month-old infants saw side-by-side silent video-clips of talking faces (a male and a female) and heard either a soundtrack of a female or a male voice telling a story in IDS or ADS. Infants participated in only one condition, either IDS or ADS. Consistent with earlier work, infants displayed advantages in matching female relative to male faces and voices. Moreover, the new finding that emerged in the current study was that extraction of gender from face and voice was stronger at 6 months with ADS than with IDS, whereas at 9 and 12 months, matching did not differ for IDS versus ADS. The results indicate that the ability to perceive gender in audiovis...
Tracing the Emergence of Gendered Language in Childhood
2020
Are gender associations in general language reflected in the words spoken to and by children? Previous work has suggested that language reveals gender differences in discourse, speech style, language use and acquisition. Work in artificial intelligence has shown that word embeddings trained on large corpora reflect human gender associations. We connect this work to developmental psychology by exploring whether gender associations in word embeddings are present in the linguistic input and output of children, and if so, how early gendered language emerges. We present a computational method that quantifies the gender associations of words and use a corpus of child-caretaker speech to show that these gender associations correlate significantly with those in word embeddings. We discover that gendered word use emerges in English-speaking children around age 2, and the gender associations cannot be explained solely by variables including word length, frequency, concreteness, and valence.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2015
This study examined whether boys with Gender Identity Disorder (GID) produced less prototypically male speech than control boys without GID, a possibility that has been suggested by clinical observations. Two groups of listeners participated in tasks where they rated the gender typicality of single words (group 1) or sentences (group 2) produced by 15 5-13 year old boys with GID and 15 age-matched boys without GID. Detailed acoustic analyses of the stimuli were also conducted. Boys with GID were rated as less boy-like than boys without GID. In the experiment using sentence stimuli, these group differences were larger than in the experiment using single-word stimuli. Listeners' ratings were predicted by a variety of acoustic parameters, including ones that differ between the two groups and ones that are stereotypically associated with adult men's and women's speech. Future research should examine how these variants are acquired. [PACS codes 43.70.Ep, 43.71.Bp] Gender Typicality in Children's Speech 3
Who cares who's talking? The influence of talker gender on how listeners hear speech
Speech perception is challenging because the acoustic input is extremely variable. This variability partially stems from differences in how talkers pronounce words. For example, Voice Onset Time (VOT) is the primary cue that distinguishes /b/ from /p/. Women tend to use longer Voice Onset Times (VOTs) than men. A VOT of 20 msec could thus be a /b/ spoken by a woman and a /p/ spoken by a man. A critical question is how listeners deal with this variability. Previous research shows that listeners use these regularities (e.g., the systematic relationship between gender and VOT) to compensate for variability. For example, listeners adjust their phoneme category boundary based on talker gender. However, it is unclear the exact mechanisms by which talker gender information influences speech processing. Talker gender could influence only later stages of speech processing, like phoneme categorization. Alternatively, talker gender could modulate the earliest stage: acoustic cue encoding. I use event-related potentials, eyetracking in the visual world paradigm, and electrocorticography to isolate the specific role of talker gender in speech perception. The results show that the auditory system influences the earliest stage of speech perception by allowing cues to be encoded relative to prior expectations about gender and that gender is integrated with acoustic cues during lexical activation. These experiments give insight into how the brain deals effectively with variability during categorization. v