The influence of gender identity on children's production of sibilant fricatives

Abstract

Phonetic differences between men and women's speech are the consequence of sex-related variation in the anatomy of the speech-production system, as well as learned behaviors specific to particular languages and to specific social and cultural contexts. Children learn socially and culturally specific gendered phonetic variants concurrent with developmental changes in the vocal tract which give the child an increasing capacity to produce systematic phonetic variation. The research in this presentation is part of a larger project examining phonetic variation in 5–13 year old boys with gender dysphoria (GD). This presentation focuses on the acoustic characteristics of /s/, which was chosen because it is the locus of a great deal of gender-related phonetic variation that appears not to be the consequence of sex differences in vocal-tract size and shape. Preliminary analyses of a subset (n = 30) of talkers from a corpus of 5 to 13 year old children (n = 104, including boys with GD and boys and girls without GD), found that boys with GD produce more [θ]-like /s/ tokens than boys without GD in single words. This talk presents the results from the entire corpus, which allows for a more robust analysis of the influence of gender identity on children’s fricative production.