Previous research has established that English‐speaking listeners identify fricatives ambiguous between /s/ and /∫/ differently depending on whether they believe the fricative to have been produced by a man or a woman. This effect occurs both when the talker’s sex is suggested by presenting speech concurrent with a picture or a man or a woman [E. Strand Journal of Language and Social Psychology (1999)], and when listeners make unprompted inferences about whether an acoustically sex‐ambiguous talker is a man or a woman [S. Kemper and B. Munson, Linguistic Society of America (2010)]. This investigation examined the time course of gender influences on fricative identification using a cross‐modal interference paradigm. Listeners heard stimuli on a five‐step sack to shack continuum created by combining synthetic fricatives with natural rimes produced by a man, a woman, or a talker whose voice had been judged independently to be sex‐ambiguous. Pictures of men or women were presented briefly either prior to, con...