What is it about?
Many assumptions are made about how listeners perceive a speaker's gender, but the research evidence supporting those assumptions is weak overall. This paper reports the findings of a systematic review of research conducted to determine what aspects of speech and voice contribute to listeners' perceptions of the gender of a speaker.
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Why is it important?
Understanding how gender is signalled through speech and voice has potential to improve speech recognition and automatic speech generation systems. This knowledge also has potential forensic and voice and speech training and rehabilitation applications.
Perspectives
Evidence as to speech and voice characteristics that determine a listener's perceptions of a speaker's gender is essential for my speech pathology clinical work with transgender women and men. Trans women and trans men frequently seek voice and speech training from speech pathologists to increase the congruence between their speech and voice characteristics and their desired gender presentation and identity. If we can assist trans women and trans men to use gender congruent communication patterns, their communicative satisfaction, social participation, and psychosocial wellbeing may also be maximised.
Jennifer Oates
La Trobe University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Voice, Articulation, and Prosody Contribute to Listener Perceptions of Speaker Gender: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, February 2018, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA),
DOI: 10.1044/2017_jslhr-s-17-0067.
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