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.

See project news and updates here.

Presentations

(*student author)

• *Kirby, A., Freeman, V., Courouleau, T., & Merritt, B. (2024, February). Interactions between voice-gender and word-gender perceptions. Poster, Texas Speech-Language-Hearing Association (TSHA), Fort Worth, TX. [abstract]
• 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), Edmond, OK. 
• *Kirby, A. (2023, April). Voice-gender effects on word gender. Poster, Undergraduate Research Symposium, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK.

People

Student:

• Athena Kirby

Collaborators:​

• Tori Courouleau, OSU Audiologist
• Brandon Merritt, UT--El Paso

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. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/M1EKER.
• Gender ratings of the words from text and from the audio clips (rated by ~30 OSU students each).

Project ideas:

• Next steps: add LGBTQ+ raters; ask listeners to rate speakers rather than words; create a gender experience questionnaire. 
• Replicate with raters from other ages, regions, etc.
• 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.