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Perception of speech naturalness in speakers of varying gender identities
What is it about?
We investigated how speech naturalness relates to masculinity–femininity and gender identification (accuracy and reaction time) for cisgender male and female speakers as well as transmasculine and transfeminine speakers. We found that perceptual speech naturalness for both transfeminine and transmasculine speakers is strongly associated with gender cues in spontaneous speech. Training to align a speaker’s voice with their gender identity may concurrently improve perceptual speech naturalness.
Why is it important?
This finding helps clarify what constitutes "natural" sounding speech production from transgender speakers and suggests that targeting speech markers of masculinity and femininity may simultaneously promote natural sounding speech.