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Adults’ Perception of Gender in Child Speech

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Abstract

Infant studies suggest that gender as a relevant indexical linguistic category is a salient part of the child's input at an early age. Between 6-8-months, children are able to match gender in face and voice (Walker-Andrews, 1991; Patterson & Werker, 2002), and they can categorize voices based on gender (Miller, Younger, & Morse, 1982). Awareness of one’s own gender emerges around 3 years and awareness that gender stays stable throughout life is evident by 4 years (Bee, 1998). These facts suggest that by year four, noticeable gender differences should emerge along a number of dimensions. The hypothesis tested by this paper is that adults are able to identify the gender of four-year old children by voice quality alone.

Twelve four-year-olds were recorded saying the alphabet, portions of which were played to 18 adults. Adults were told the child's age and asked to identify the speaker's gender. Subjects were able to correctly identify the gender of the child more often than chance (63% of all choices were correct). Several children were also identified more quickly and reliably (either correctly or incorrectly) than others. We discuss what possible cues listeners are using when identifying these 'sure things,' including pitch (F0), voice quality (breathy), nasality, times beween letters, rhythm, and pitch contour. Noneof these factors consistently explained why some children were consistently perceived as boys and girls. However, vowel quality (specifically the height and backness of [ai] and [iy]) was a good, but not perfect, overall predictor of whether children would be perceived as a girl or boy.

In addition, reaction time was significantly higher when the voice was a girl’s, but was believed to be a boy’s. This result suggests that there are multiple cues being used by speakers to determine gender, and that for tokens which as boys heard as girls, there may be a mismatch between some of the cues.

This is preliminary work, and we are interested in hearing comments and suggestions. We plan further experiements larger samples, different stimuli (including stimuli that is manipulated to change only a single cue), older and younger children, and using young children as judges.

References

Bee, H. (1998). Lifespan development (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Longman.

Miller, C. L., Younger, B. A., & Morse, P. A. (1982). The categorization of male and female voices in infancy. Infant Behavior and Development, 5, 143-159.

Patterson, M., & Werker, J. F. (2002). Infants' ability to match dynamic information in the face and voice. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 81, 93-115.

Walker-Andrews, A. S., Bahrick, L.E., Raglioni, S.S. & Isabel Diaz. (1991). Infants' bimodal perception of gender. Ecological Psychology, 3(2), 55-75.