Gender typicality in children's speech, reconsidered: Effects of stimulus composition on listener judgments

Abstract

Listeners rate the speech of boys and girls as young as four years old as sounding gendered: boys are rated as sounding boy-like and girls as girl-like (Perry et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. [2001]). Recent research found that the extent to which boys’ speech sounds boy-like is correlated with measures of their gender identity and expression (Li et al., J. Phonetics [2016], Munson et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. [2015]). Munson et al. found that boys with a diagnosis of gender identity disorder [GID] were rated as sounding less boy-like than boys without GID. Munson et al.’s experiment used only a small number of girls’ productions as filler items. The current study examined listeners’ ratings of the gender typicality of speech of boys with GID and both boys and girls without GID. Significant differences in sex-typicality ratings were found between the two groups of boys. Boys with GID elicited ratings intermediate to those for boys and girls without GID. However, the differences between boys with and without GID were much smaller than those in Munson et al., suggesting that the sex distribution in the stimulus set can affect ratings of the sex typicality of children’s voices.