A cross-linguistic study of the effect of perceived gender on the categorization of children's vowels

Abstract

Previous research has shown that listeners classify acoustically gender-ambiguous vowels differently depending on whether they believe the speaker to be a man or a woman (Johnson, Strand, & D'Imperio, 1999). In real-world listening situations, this tendency could be especially pronounced in the perception of vowels produced by children, as children's voices are inherently gender-ambiguous (Perry, Ohde, & Ashmead, 2001). Given Johnson et al.'s findings, we would predict that adults would categorize children's vowels differently depending on whether they believe the speaker to bes male or female. To examine this hypothesis, a set of experiments was conducted in which native speakers of Cantonese, Japanese, and English categorized a series of synthetic vowels (Menard et al., 2006). These were generated using an articulatory synthesizer, and were meant to represent the vocal tracts of newborn children, 2-, 4-, 5-, 10-, 16-, and 21-year olds. Adults categorized these vowels and provided judgments of the perceived gender and age of the speakers. Preliminary results suggest that speakers of English categorize vowels differently depending on whether they judge the child to be male or female. This tendency is especially marked for the most gender-ambiguous stimulus set, those based on the 10-year-old vocal tract.