Examining vowel fronting and lengthening as indicators of feminine voices in Southern English speech

Abstract

Fronting and lengthening of lax vowels /ɪ ɛ ɑ/ but not /ʊ/ was found to make words sound more feminine for Southern U.S. listeners (Shport, 2018). This study examined whether /ɪ ɛ ɑ/ are more fronted and are longer in female than male speech. Fifty speakers from Louisiana (27 Black, 23 White, 31 females, 19 males) participated in a word-reading task (4 vowels × 3 words × 4 repetitions). The effects of gender and ethnicity on Lobanov-normalized F2 and duration values were examined using generalized linear modeling. For duration, only /ɛ/ was significantly longer in female than in male productions. For F2, significant differences were found only in productions of the back vowels: /ɑ/ was fronted more by male than female speakers (the gender difference was larger in White speakers); /ʊ/ was fronted more by female than male speakers (and more so by White than Black speakers). These results suggest that Southerners’ perception of relatively fronted and longer variants of /ɪ ɛ ɑ/ as sounding more feminine is not firmly grounded in the acoustic characteristics of these vowels in Southern female as compared to male speech. Possible influences of formant normalization and ethnolectal variation on result interpretation are discussed.