Power mediates the processing of gender during sibilant categorization

Prior studies suggest that listeners are more likely to categorize a sibilant ranging acoustically from [∫] to [s] as /s/ if provided auditory or visual information about the speaker that suggests male gender. Social cognition can also be affected by experimentally induced differences in power. A powerful individual’s impression of another tends to show greater consistency with the other person’s broad social category, while a powerless individual’s impression is more consistent with the specific pieces of information provided about the other person. This study investigated whether sibilant categorization would be influenced by power when the listener is presented with inconsistent sources of information about speaker gender. Participants were experimentally primed for behavior consistent with powerful or powerless individuals. They then completed a forced choice identification task: They saw a visual stimulus (a male or female face) and categorized an auditory stimulus (ranging from ‘shy’ to ‘sigh’) as /∫/ or /s/. As expected, participants primed for high power were sensitive to a single cue to gender, while those who received the low power prime were sensitive to both, even if the cues did not match. This result suggests that variability in listener power may cause systematic differences in phonetic perception.