Children’s perception of gender in other children’s voices

Abstract

Studies investigating perception of speaker gender in children have mostly been conducted with adults as listeners in experimental tasks. Based on these adult judgments, results converge in showing that the gender of prepubescent children can be identified well above chance (even in the absence of reliable anatomical differences related to their vocal tract morphology) and that sentences provide more gender cues than do isolated syllables. Our previous work added that adults can utilize sociocultural cues in regional dialects in making their gender identification decisions (Holt etal., 2022). Here, we examine how children perceive gender in other children’s voices, and whether their judgments differ appreciably from adults. Children ages 8-11 years listened to various utterances (isolated syllables, read sentences, and spontaneous speech) of age-matched peers from three dialect regions in the US. Our provisional findings are that, overall, children are less sensitive to gender cues than the adults, and their judgments are more dependent on the talker’s age than on information in longer passages of speech in sentences and talks. Contrary to adults, regional dialect does not seem to influence children’s decisions, suggesting that perceptual attunement to a particular variety may not facilitate gender identification in other children.