Perceptual evaluation of speech naturalness in speakers of varying gender identities

Abstract

Most auditory-perceptual evaluations of speech from individuals who are transgender have focused on perceived masculinity and femininity. Recent work has begun to investigate speech naturalness, which many transgender individuals report as a voice training goal. Voice masculinity/femininity may be linked to perceived speech naturalness based on listener sensitivity to talker gender and expectations surrounding prototypical male and female voices. Because transgender speakers are often rated as sounding less masculine or feminine than cisgender speakers, their perceived speech naturalness may be negatively impacted. This study investigates how speech naturalness ratings relate to masculinity-femininity ratings and gender identification (accuracy and reaction time). Spontaneous speech samples from 20 transgender (10 transmasculine; 10 transfeminine) and 20 cisgender (10 male; 10 female) speakers were included in three tasks: a two-alternative forced-choice gender identification task, a speech naturalness rating task, and a masculinity/femininity rating task. Utterances rated as less natural took longer to identify and were identified less accurately in the gender identification task; furthermore, they were placed in the middle of the masculinity/femininity scale. These results suggest that training to align a speaker's voice with their gender identity may concurrently improve perceptual speech naturalness.