The influence of talker gender, formant-frequency scaling, and presumed sources of variance on the perception of voiceless fricatives in American English.

Abstract

We examined listeners’ identification of sigh-shy and sigh-thigh stimuli created by appending /s/-/∫/ and /s/-/θ/ continua to tokens of /ɑɪ/ excised from the natural productions of sigh spoken by one man and one woman. The values of the formants for the vocalic bases were scaled to give the illusion of differences in talkers’ overall stature. Five levels of scaling were created for both the man and woman’s productions. For the /s/-/∫/ continuum, listeners perceived more /∫/ with women’s voices than with men’s voices but, contrary to earlier research, showed gradient effects of formant scaling on phoneme boundaries for both the male and female tokens. For the /s/-/θ/ continuum, more /s/ tokens were identified for women’s voices than for men’s voices. Gradient effects of formant-frequency scaling were found for both men’s and women’s voices, and these were much smaller than those for /s/-/∫/. Listeners who were led to believe that the scaling reflected differences in talkers’ age height showed a bigger influence of scaling on /s/-/θ/ perception than did listeners who were told they reflected differences in height. Together, these results show that perceived gender, vocal-tract normalization, and social stereotypes influence fricative identification.