Gender normalization in fricative perception in single- and mixed-gender blocks

Abstract

Previous research has shown that listeners’ identification of English anterior sibilant fricatives changes depending on whether they are primed to believe that the talker is a woman or a man, by pairing audio stimuli with images or videos of a woman or a man (Munson, 2011; Strand & Johnson, 1996; Winn et al., 2013). The current experiment is part of a program of research that endeavors to understand the nature of imputed gender effects in speech perception. Previous studies used fully within-subjects designs: listeners were presented with all stimuli combined with both male and female faces. The current experiment examined whether gender normalization occurs equally strongly in within-groups designs, and between-groups designs in which listeners are presented with only male or female faces. Four groups of listeners identified a nine-step sack-shack continuum created by combining a s-∫ continuum with a natural production of a VC that had been acoustically manipulated to be gender-neutral. Listeners were presented with a male face only, a female face only, both male and female faces in separate trials, or no face. Results will indicate how robust gender normalization effects are across different experimental conditions.