Suzanne Curtin & Scott F. Kiesling Adults' Perception of Gender in Children's Speech

University of Pittsburgh
Department of Linguistics
University of Pittsburgh, 2816
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
kiesling@pitt.edu
scurtin@pitt.edu

Abstract

Infant studies suggest that gender as a relevant indexical linguistic category is a salient part of the child's input at an early age. Between 6-8-months, children are able to match gender in face and voice (Walker-Andrews, 1991; Patterson & Werker, 2002), and they can categorize voices based on gender (Miller, Younger, & Morse, 1982). Awareness of one's own gender emerges around 3 years and awareness that gender stays stable throughout life is evident by 4 years (Bee, 1998). These facts suggest that by year four, noticeable gender differences should emerge along a number of dimensions. The hypothesis tested by this paper is that adults are able to identify the gender of four-year old children by voice quality alone.

Sixteen four-year-olds were recorded saying the alphabet, portions of which were played to forty adults. Adults were told the child's age and asked to identify the speaker's gender. Subjects were able to correctly identify the gender of the child more often than chance. Several children were also identified more quickly and reliably than others. We discuss what possible cues listeners are using when identifying these 'sure things.'

These results have important implications for our understanding of the linguistic cues that listeners use to identify the gender of speakers; they must be relying on phonetic cues that are much more subtle than gross lexical, phonological or syntactic differences which are the usual provision of language and gender research. Moreover, it shows that children begin to master the production of these cues before their fourth birthday.

References:

Bee, H. (1998). Lifespan development (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Longman.
Miller, C. L., Younger, B. A., & Morse, P. A. (1982). The categorization of male and female voices in infancy. Infant Behavior and Development, 5, 143-159.
Patterson, M., & Werker, J. F. (2002). Infants' ability to match dynamic information in the face and voice. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 81, 93-115.
Walker-Andrews, A. S., Bahrick, L.E., Raglioni, S.S. & Isabel Diaz. (1991). Infants' bimodal perception of gender. Ecological Psychology, 3(2), 55-75.

Poster Materials

http://www.pitt.edu/~kiesling/perception/genderperception.html



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