Adults’ Perception of Gender in Child Speech |
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This study was conceived as a first stage in exploring how gender is perceived phonetically. It has shown that adults can identify children most of the time, and suggested that vowel quality is the main cue for this determination. However, the study has raised many more questions than it has answered:
How robust is this finding? Will other experiments with different but similar tasks and different (and larger) subject populations replicate these findings?
Can these findings be replicated by manipulating single phonetic cues?
Will children of the same age be better or worse at identifying gender?
Why do some children sound like girls and some like boys?
Are the children actively working to be more masculine or feminine?
What are the social and psychological motivations for these differentiations?
We thus plan future experiments along similar lines with the following characteristics:
Larger samples of both children and adults, including more adults who have contact with children;
Different stimuli, such as a story that is narratied from a picture book;
Resythesis of stimuli to control single factors in a matched guise experimental design.
Replication of the experiment with older and younger children;
Replication of the experiment with young children as judges.