Word/Voice Gender

How does the perceived gender of a speaker's voice interact with the gender associated with words?

While English doesn't have much grammatical gender, speakers still associate some words and concepts with a gender (e.g., strong, truck, punch vs. dainty, flower, bake). Listeners also perceive speakers' genders through their voices. This study investigates how the perceived gender of a person's voice influences their word-gender associations and vice-versa -- and how the gender experience of listeners affects their rating patterns.

The preliminary results are fascinating! See the poster link below.

Presentations (*student author):

*Kirby, A. (2023, April). Voice-gender effects on word gender. Poster, Undergraduate Research Symposium, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK.

Students & Collaborators:

Athena Kirby
Tori Courouleau (OSU Audiologist)

Student Corner

Data and materials:

Audio clips of people of different gender identities reading a word list. Individual words cut from:
- Becker, K. Khan, S. D., & Zimman, L. (2016). Reed Linguistics Gender and Language Project. Harvard Dataverse. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/M1EKER.
Gender ratings of the words from text and from the audio clips (rated by ~30 OSU students each).

Project ideas:

Next steps: add LGBTQ+ raters; ask listeners to rate speakers rather than words; create a gender experience questionnaire.
Replicate with raters from other ages, regions, etc.
Replicate with other words.
Extend by showing photos that do/don't match the word's associated gender (or the speaker's perceived gender) while raters listen.

Projects

Word/Voice Gender

Student Corner

Sociophonetics Lab