Examinations of speaker gender perception have primarily focused on the roles of fundamental frequency (fo) and formant frequencies from structured speech tasks using cisgender speakers. Yet, there is evidence to suggest that fo and formants do not fully account for listeners’ perceptual judgements of gender, particularly from connected speech. This study investigated the perceptual importance of fo, formant frequencies, articulation, and intonation in listeners’ judgements of gender identity and masculinity/femininity from spontaneous speech from cisgender male and female speakers as well as transfeminine and transmasculine speakers. Stimuli were spontaneous speech samples from 12 speakers who are cisgender (6 female and 6 male) and 12 speakers who are transgender (6 transfeminine and 6 transmasculine). Listeners performed a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) gender identification task and masculinity/femininity rating task in two experiments that manipulated which acoustic cues were available. Experiment 1 confirmed that fo and formant frequency manipulations were insufficient to alter listener judgements across all speakers. Experiment 2 demonstrated that articulatory cues had greater weighting than intonation cues on the listeners’ judgements when the fo and formant frequencies were in a gender ambiguous range. These findings counter the assumptions that fo and formant manipulations are sufficient to effectively alter perceived speaker gender.
Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate how speech naturalness relates to masculinity–femininity and gender identification (accuracy and reaction time) for cisgender male and female speakers as well as transmasculine and transfeminine speakers. Method Stimuli included spontaneous speech samples from 20 speakers who are transgender (10 transmasculine and 10 transfeminine) and 20 speakers who are cisgender (10 male and 10 female). Fifty-two listeners completed three tasks: a two-alternative forced-choice gender identification task, a speech naturalness rating task, and a masculinity/femininity rating task. Results Transfeminine and transmasculine speakers were rated as significantly less natural sounding than cisgender speakers. Speakers rated as less natural took longer to identify and were identified less accurately in the gender identification task; furthermore, they were rated as less prototypically masculine/feminine. Conclusions Perceptual speech naturalness for both transfeminine and transmasculine speakers is strongly associated with gender cues in spontaneous speech. Training to align a speaker's voice with their gender identity may concurrently improve perceptual speech naturalness. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12543158
Segmental (e.g., articulation) and suprasegmental (e.g., intonation) speech features provide meaningful perceptual cues to speaker gender. Yet, the relative perceptual importance of these features remains poorly understood. Further, proposed methods for quantifying these features often require labor-intensive measurement by human judges. This study used an acoustic-only method to quantify segmental and suprasegmental features among 60 speakers with varied gender identities (e.g., non-binary, transgender and cisgender men and women) and compared these acoustic measures to human perceptual judgements of speaker gender. Thirty listeners rated confidence in speaker gender and masculinity/femininity for each speaker. To obtain acoustic distance among speakers, three conditions were created that manipulated which acoustic features were present in the speech utterances. Acoustic distance was calculated in each of the three conditions between each speaker and a cisgender man and woman who were perceptually rated as most gender prototypical. Acoustic distances for the three conditions were fit to regression models to determine which was most predictive of listeners’ perceptual judgements. Both segmental and intonation features predicted perceptual measures. However, segmental cues better explained listener’s ratings, suggesting their greater perceptual weighting in listeners’ judgements of speaker gender.
Fundamental frequency and vowel formant frequencies are reportedly the most salient acoustic-phonetic cues used to judge speaker gender. However, the influence of these cues on listeners' extraction of gender and lexical information from spontaneous speech is poorly understood. This study evaluated the perceptual impacts of modifying fundamental frequency and formant frequencies in spontaneously produced speech by cisgender and transgender individuals. Spontaneous speech samples from 12 transgender (6 transfeminine and 6 transmasculine) and 12 cisgender (6 male and 6 female) speakers were included in three tasks: a speech-in-noise intelligibility task, a two-alternative forced-choice gender identification task, and a masculinity/femininity rating task, in one of two conditions: an unmodified condition or a modified condition in which fundamental and formant frequencies were manipulated to fall within either prototypical cisgender male/female range for the transgender speakers or an intermediate, gender-ambiguous range for the cisgender speakers. Results suggest shifting fundamental frequency and formant frequencies toward prototypically male/female ranges in connected speech can effectively alter listeners' gender identification judgements, but these variables alone may not be sufficient to alter perceived vocal masculinity/femininity to within typical cisgender ranges for transgender speakers. Further, strategies used by transfeminine speakers to achieve gender-congruent voice may negatively affect speech intelligibility.
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