Abstract
This study investigates a possible relationship between perceived and self-ascribed gender identity and the respective acoustic correlates in a group of young heterosexual adult speakers. For the production study, a sample of 37 German speaking subjects (20 males, 17 females) filled out a questionnaire to assess their self-ascribed masculinity/femininity on two scales. A range of acoustic parameters (acoustic vowel space size, fundamental frequency, sibilant spectral characteristics) were measured in speech collected from a picture describing task. Results show that male speakers judging themselves to be less masculine exhibited larger vowel spaces and higher average fundamental frequency.For the perception experiment, a group of 21 listeners (11 males, 10 females) judged masculinity of single word male stimuli drawn from the collected speech sample. A significant correlation between speakers’ self-ascribed and listeners’ attributed gender identity was found with a stronger relationship for female listeners. Acoustic parameters used by listeners to attribute gender identity include those used by speakers to index masculinity/femininity.The investigation demonstrates the importance of including self-ascribed gender identity as a potential source of inter-speaker variation in speech production and perception even in a sample of heterosexual adult speakers.
Highlights
The traditional gender dichotomy is being increasingly called into question, both in popular discourse as well as in the scientific domain
Traditional Masculinity-Femininity scale (TMF) and GEPAQ significantly correlate for both genders: r = .61, p < .01, r = .45, p
The relationship is less strong in males, which is mirrored by the large variation in the GEPAQ scores with similar TMF scores, e.g., around the mean value of 2.8
Summary
The traditional gender dichotomy is being increasingly called into question, both in popular discourse as well as in the scientific domain. Even when traditional male-female group categorization is adhered to, studies find a great deal of within-group variation in gender identity [4,5] which can be attributed to both behavioral and physiological factors while it is still unclear how the two interact
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