Perception of Gender in Voices of 8- to 12-Year-Old Children in the Context of Regional Dialect Variation.

Purpose: This study investigated the perception of gender in voices of older children, around the onset of puberty. The aim was to characterize gender categorization performance of adult and age-matched child listeners under the conditions of noise and talker variability arising from regional dialect variation.

Method: A total of 49 participants, 26 adults and 23 children, listened to syllables, read sentences, and phrases from spontaneous conversations produced by 90 children aged 8-12 years, representing three regional varieties of American English spoken in Ohio, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, evenly divided by gender in each dialect group (15 boys, 15 girls). All stimuli were masked by speech-shaped noise and presented over laboratory headphones in a two-alternative forced-choice paradigm. Linear mixed-effects models were used with listener group (adults, children), speaker age in months, dialect, and speaker gender as fixed predictors of listener accuracy; all listeners were from Ohio. Models were also constructed with fundamental frequency as the most prominent perceptual cue to gender.

Results: Accuracy was above chance, with children outperforming adults in listening to syllables and spontaneous phrases. Speaker age increased accuracy for boys but not for girls, and fundamental frequency was a stronger accuracy predictor than age for both genders. Feminine and masculine characteristics in children's voices varied with dialect; listeners were sensitive to these variations, showing attunement to the local dialect norms, more so in girls than in boys.

Conclusions: Gender of 8- to 12-year-old children can be identified above chance when masked by noise. Age-matched child listeners' performance is adultlike, and children may have enhanced sensitivity to gender in other children's speech. Sociocultural context does influence gender categorization, indicating that characteristics of gendered speech are learned from a local community.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.30104353.