The (minimal) influence of perceived age on the perceived gender of children's speech

Abstract

The acoustic characteristics of boys and girls' speech resemble adult norms for men and women, respectively, early in life. Moreover, the extent to which a child's speech resembles the adult norms for their biological sex is related to other measures of the extent to which their gender development meets cultural norms [e.g., Perry et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 109 (01); Munson et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 137 (15); and Beaulieu et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 143 (18)]. The acoustic cues to gender in children's speech are distributed throughout the speech signal. Hence, the most common method to determine the attainment of gendered speech is by gathering perceptual ratings of gender typicality. In this study, we examine whether ratings of the gender typicality of children's speech are affected by ratings of another potentially salient attribute that speech acoustics convey: speaker age. We conducted an experiment in which perceived gender and perceived age ratings were collected for the single-word productions of 57 5–13 year old children examined by Beaulieu et al. (18) and brief spoken narratives by the same children. Preliminary results suggest that the effects of talker sex are robust when both actual age and perceived age are controlled statistically.The acoustic characteristics of boys and girls' speech resemble adult norms for men and women, respectively, early in life. Moreover, the extent to which a child's speech resembles the adult norms for their biological sex is related to other measures of the extent to which their gender development meets cultural norms [e.g., Perry et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 109 (01); Munson et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 137 (15); and Beaulieu et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 143 (18)]. The acoustic cues to gender in children's speech are distributed throughout the speech signal. Hence, the most common method to determine the attainment of gendered speech is by gathering perceptual ratings of gender typicality. In this study, we examine whether ratings of the gender typicality of children's speech are affected by ratings of another potentially salient attribute that speech acoustics convey: speaker age. We conducted an experiment in which perceived gender and perceived age ratings were collected for the single-word productions o...