Gender expansive listeners utilize a non-binary, multidimensional conception of gender to inform voice gender perception

Differences in Sibilant Perception between Gender Expansive and Cisgender Individuals

“…"Best" means from the task itself that the listener thought it was the most "she" or "see" like and thus can mean "most accurate," but it also can reflect a preference of the listener for that voice and thus could reflect "most preferred." For the GE group, we expected a fairly even distribution between the three vocal tract conditions, as Hope and Lilley 18 found that GE listeners have a third distinct voice gender category anchored in a nonbinary vocal tract. In contrast, we anticipated the cisgender participants would largely choose either the MVT voice or the FVT voice, potentially with a slight bias toward the MVT voice.…”

“…has not yet considered synthetic voice a part of the discussion. Hope and Lilley 17,18 were the first to explore a multidimensional, nonbinary voice gender framework of perception which utilized synthetic voice as stimuli. However, that study was limited to subjective voice gender and did not examine how processing of phonemes themselves may be impacted by gender group and community membership.…”

“…We use three different sets of vocal tract parameters based on the results from Hope and Lilley 17,18 which showed that GE people have a distinct "other" gender perception which is correlated with a nonbinary vocal tract created from averaging across male and female vocal tracts. A neutral pitch range was used for two reasons: (1) the results of Hope and Lilley 17,18 were based on stimuli with pitch held in the neutral range and (2) this ensured that pitch would not sway results and obscure the detection of differences in categorization due to vocal tract. The f 0 of the stimuli was also within the "neutral range" (145-175 Hz) according to Davies and colleagues.…”

“…We hypothesized that, because GE individuals have shown a unique nonbinary voice gender perception in addition to female and male voice genders, 18 the GE group would categorize sibilants differently between all three vocal tracts, whereas we hypothesized that cisgender listeners would show only a difference between the male and female vocal tracts, with their responses to the nonbinary vocal tract being statistically indistinguishable from either of the other two. For listener group differences, we hypothesized that GE and cisgender listeners would categorize sibilants significantly differently from each other for the nonbinary vocal tract.…”

“…This study seeks to examine how GE people categorize sibilants compared to cisgender people when the voices are kept in a "neutral" pitch range using synthetically made voices with varying vocal tract parameters (i.e., formant frequencies and spectral information). We use three different sets of vocal tract parameters based on the results from Hope and Lilley 17,18 which showed that GE people have a distinct "other" gender perception which is correlated with a nonbinary vocal tract created from averaging across male and female vocal tracts. A neutral pitch range was used for two reasons: (1) the results of Hope and Lilley 17,18 were based on stimuli with pitch held in the neutral range and (2) this ensured that pitch would not sway results and obscure the detection of differences in categorization due to vocal tract.…”