A longitudinal study of gender-specific characteristics of children’s vowels

Abstract

Cisgender adult men and women’s vocal tracts differ in length, but the vocal tracts of children assigned male at birth (AMAB) and assigned female at birth (AFAB) do not. Despite this, a growing body of literature has shown that naive listeners robustly rate AMAB and AFAB children’s speech to sound different from one another. Recently, Munson et al. (2019) found that this was true for children as young as 2.5 years old. However, it is unclear what gender-specific phonetic features exist in children’s speech, and how children acquire them. The current study investigates the vowel-space size and shape for the 55 AMAB and 55 AFAB children examined in a longitudinal study by Munson et al. at two time-points: 2.5 to 3.5 years old, and 4.5 to 5.5 years old. We aim to assess whether the AMAB and AFAB children’s vowel spaces differ in size and shape, and to determine whether these predict the ratings collected by Munson et al. As women’s vowel spaces are typically more expanded than men’s (Bradlow et al., 1996), we expect to find larger vowel spaces in AFAB children than AMAB children. Data analysis is ongoing. [Funded by NIH R01 DC002932.]