Gender-related variation in /s/ and /ʃ/ in child-directed speech

Abstract

Previous research showed that 3-year-old children assigned male at birth begin to produce /s/ differently from children assigned female at birth (Munson, Koeppe & Lackas, 2022). This mirrors the differences in /s/ found between cisgender men and women in American English (e.g., Jongman, Wayland & Wong, 2000; Munson, McDonald, DeBoe, & White, 2006). The current study investigates whether children are exposed to the gender-marking /s/ variants through child-directed speech, a hypothesis suggested by Foulkes, Docherty, and Watt (2005). We collected speech samples from 36 mothers of children aged 2 to 3 years through a story-reading task. Mothers read a male-themed story and a female-themed story to their children. We also measured mothers’ attitude towards their children’s gendered behavior. Spectral characteristics of /s/ and /ʃ/ were measured. As there was no evidence that /ʃ/ marks gender, the acoustic characteristics of /ʃ/ is measured to control for the potential influence of anatomical variation on fricative acoustics. Analysis is ongoing, and will examine whether the acoustic characteristics of /s/ in male- and female-themed stories resemble the male- and female-typed /s/ variants found in previous studies. The results of this study will inform models of the development of gendered speech in children.