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Representation and other trends in speech-gender perception studies
What is it about?
Many scientists and clinicians want to know what factors make a listener think a voice is masculine or feminine. This review evaluates the questions, 1) who are the participants for these studies, and 2) how are these studies being conducted? We found that participants are primarily white young adults who speak General American English or that they are unreported. Almost all the ways that these studies were conducted involved quantitative, numeric scales and most used recorded speech samples that were at least a full word long.
Why is it important?
Our main findings show that there is room in the future to increase the span of demographic representation in this area of science. Most clients who seek this service are not interacting with young, white adults as their primary communication partners. It is possible that different dialects, age ranges, and other background information might play into how gender is both expressed and perceived. Additionally, it is possible that only numeric scales to rate gender might be excluding something important.