Phonology Circle - Grace Brown / Influences of gender expectations on perception of English sibilants
Phonology Circle - Grace Brown / Influences of gender expectations on perception of English sibilants
Wednesday October 26, Baggett Fellow Grace Brown presents her work on "Influences of gender expectations on perception of English sibilants". Her abstract is below.
First Impressions: Influences of Gender Expectations on Perception of English Sibilants
Listeners’ expectations of speaker gender influence their linguistic decisions, including their judgments of the English sibilants /ʃ/ and /s/. This project consists of three experimental studies, each utilizing shack-sack continua, that further investigate the relation between gender expectations and linguistic percepts. Study One employed a design in which listeners first made shack-sack decisions for gender-ambiguous auditory stimuli and, after reporting the perceived gender of that speaker, again made shack-sack decisions while looking at a gender-specific visual prime (female or male face) for that speaker. This study was intended to assess whether providing listeners with explicit gender information that supports or violates their initial gender expectations leads listeners to revise their linguistic (/ʃ/-/s/) judgments. The main outcome of this study, which was replicated in Study Three with a larger data set, was that providing explicit gender information had no effect on listeners’ initial shack-sack judgments. Study Two tested for, and ruled out, possible contributions of the particular stimulus set to these findings. Overall, these results illustrate, using a two-part shack-sack identification task, the staying power of listeners’ initial perception of speaker gender and, consequently, of their linguistic decisions about the speech produced by that speaker.