nissen19@interspeech_2019@ISCA

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#1 Listeners’ Ability to Identify the Gender of Preadolescent Children in Different Linguistic Contexts [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi1]

Authors: Shawn Nissen ; Sharalee Blunck ; Anita Dromey ; Christopher Dromey

This study evaluated listeners’ ability to identify the gender of preadolescent children from speech samples of varying length and linguistic context. The listeners were presented with a total of 190 speech samples in four different categories of linguistic context: segments, words, sentences, and discourse. The listeners were instructed to evaluate each speech sample and decide whether the speaker was a male or female and rate their level of confidence in their decision. Results showed listeners identified the gender of the speakers with a high degree of accuracy, ranging from 86% to 95%. Significant differences in listener judgments were found across the four levels of linguistic context, with segments having the lowest accuracy (83%) and discourse the highest accuracy (99%). At the segmental level, the listeners’ identification of each speaker’s gender was greater for vowels than for fricatives, with both types of phoneme being identified at a rate well above chance. Significant differences in identification were found between the /s/ and /ʃ/ fricatives, but not between the four corner vowels. The perception of gender is likely multifactorial, with listeners possibly using phonetic, prosodic, or stylistic speech cues to determine a speaker’s gender.