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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.

Presentations

(*student authors)

  • Freeman, V., *Kirby, A., Courouleau, T., & Merritt, B. (2024, February). Interactions between voice-gender and word-gender perceptions. Poster, Texas Speech-Language-Hearing Association (TSHA), Fort Worth, TX. 
  • Freeman, V., *Kirby, A., & Courouleau, T. (2023, October). Word-gender and voice-gender perceptions in LGBTQ+ vs. cishet listeners. New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV), Queens, NY. 
  • *Kirby, A., Freeman, V., & Courouleau, T. (2023, October). Voice-gender effects on word gender. Poster, Oklahoma Speech-Language-Hearing Association (OSHA) annual conference, Edmond, OK.
  • *Kirby, A. (2023, April). Voice-gender effects on word gender. Poster, Undergraduate Research Symposium, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK.

Students & Collaborators

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.
  • Gender ratings of the words from text and from the audio clips (rated by ~30 OSU students each).
Project Ideas
  • 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.
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