Perception of Femininity and Masculinity in Voices as Rated by Transgender and Gender Diverse People, Professional Speech and Language Pathologists, and Cisgender Naive Listeners

OBJECTIVE

To explore whether cisgender naive listeners, transgender and gender diverse (TGD) listeners, and speech-language pathologists (SLPs) experienced in providing gender-affirming voice training differ in their perception of femininity and masculinity in voices.

METHODS

Samples of spontaneous speech were collected from 95 cisgender, and 37 TGD speakers. Three listener groups of cisgender naive (N = 77), TGD (N = 30), and SLP (N = 14) listeners, respectively, rated the voices on visual analog scales in two randomly ordered blocks, in which the perceived degree of femininity was rated separately from the perceived degree of masculinity.

RESULTS

The three listener groups showed similar patterns in their distribution of ratings on the femininity and masculinity scales. The TGD listeners' mean ratings did not differ from the cisgender naive listeners', whereas SLPs showed a small, but significant, difference in their ratings compared with both TGD and cisgender naive listeners and rated the voices lower on both the femininity and masculinity scales.

CONCLUSION

The results differ from previous studies as TGD, and cisgender naive listeners rated the voices very similarly. The lower ratings of femininity and masculinity by the SLPs were likely influenced by their awareness of the complexity in the perception of voices. Therefore, SLPs providing gender-affirming voice training should be attentive to how their professional training may influence their perception of femininity and masculinity in voices and encourage discussions and explorations of the TGD voice client's perceptions of voices.

Lexical effects on talker discrimination in adult cochlear implant usersa)

The lexical and phonological content of an utterance impacts the processing of talker-specific details in normal-hearing (NH) listeners. Adult cochlear implant (CI) users demonstrate difficulties in talker discrimination, particularly for same-gender talker pairs, which may alter the reliance on lexical information in talker discrimination. The current study examined the effect of lexical content on talker discrimination in 24 adult CI users. In a remote AX talker discrimination task, word pairs-produced either by the same talker (ST) or different talkers with the same (DT-SG) or mixed genders (DT-MG)-were either lexically easy (high frequency, low neighborhood density) or lexically hard (low frequency, high neighborhood density). The task was completed in quiet and multi-talker babble (MTB). Results showed an effect of lexical difficulty on talker discrimination, for same-gender talker pairs in both quiet and MTB. CI users showed greater sensitivity in quiet as well as less response bias in both quiet and MTB for lexically easy words compared to lexically hard words. These results suggest that CI users make use of lexical content in same-gender talker discrimination, providing evidence for the contribution of linguistic information to the processing of degraded talker information by adult CI users.

Accent rating of vocoded foreign-accented speech by native listeners

This study examined accent rating of speech samples collected from 12 Mandarin-accented English talkers and two native English talkers. The speech samples were processed with noise- and tone-vocoders at 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 channels. The accentedness of the vocoded and unprocessed signals was judged by 53 native English listeners on a 9-point scale. The foreign-accented talkers were judged as having a less strong accent in the vocoded conditions than in the unprocessed condition. The native talkers and foreign-accented talkers with varying degrees of accentedness demonstrated different patterns of accent rating changes as a function of the number of channels.

Assessing the Specificity and Accuracy of Accent Judgments by Lay Listeners

Historically, there has been less research carried out on earwitness than eyewitness testimony. However, in some cases, earwitness evidence might play an important role in securing a conviction. This paper focuses on accent which is a central characteristic of voices in a forensic linguistic context. The paper focuses on two experiments (Experiment 1, n = 41; Experiment 2, n = 57) carried out with participants from a wide range of various locations around the United Kingdom to rate the accuracy and confidence in recognizing accents from voices from England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Ireland as well as looking at specificity of answers given and how this varies for these regions. Our findings show that accuracy is variable and that participants are more likely to be accurate when using vaguer descriptions (such as "Scottish") than being more specific. Furthermore, although participants lack the meta-linguistic ability to describe the features of accents, they are able to name particular words and pronunciations which helped them make their decision.

Selecting among competing models of talker adaptation: Attention, cognition, and memory in speech processing efficiency

Phonetic variability across talkers imposes additional processing costs during speech perception, often measured by performance decrements between single- and mixed-talker conditions. However, models differ in their predictions about whether accommodating greater phonetic variability (i.e., more talkers) imposes greater processing costs. We measured speech processing efficiency in a speeded word identification task, in which we manipulated the number of talkers (1, 2, 4, 8, or 16) listeners heard. Word identification was less efficient in every mixed-talker condition compared to the single-talker condition, but the magnitude of this performance decrement was not affected by the number of talkers. Furthermore, in a condition with uniform transition probabilities between two talkers, word identification was more efficient when the talker was the same as the prior trial compared to trials when the talker switched. These results support an auditory streaming model of talker adaptation, where processing costs associated with changing talkers result from attentional reorientation.