The role of gender expectations on word recognition

Abstract

Socio-indexical and linguistic information bi-directionally interact during speech processing. Information about a speaker’s age, gender, or ethnicity, conveyed through speech or visual cues, can influence how acoustic-phonetic cues are mapped to phoneme categories. For example, in McGowan (2015), Chinese-accented English sentences were presented along with a Chinese face (congruent), Caucasian face (incongruent), or no detailed visual information. Intelligibility scores were significantly higher in the congruent than the incongruent condition. Here, we investigate whether similar effects are observed for talker gender. Participants orthographically transcribed sentences mixed with noise from native American English male and female talkers. A gender congruent or incongruent visual face prime was presented before each sentence. In a control condition, different participants completed the task without the inclusion of visual face primes. Results showed that female talkers were significantly more intelligible than male talkers. Further, a gender congruency benefit was observed for female talkers, but not for male talkers. No incongruency cost was found; intelligibility scores in the incongruent and no-face control conditions did not differ. Although congruency effects were only observed with female talkers, the results suggest that expectations about speaker gender can influence word recognition accuracy similar to previously reported ethnicity effects.