Lian Arzbecker

Postdoctoral researcher


Curriculum vitae


arzbecker.1 (at) osu (dot) edu | lianarzb (at) buffalo (dot) edu


Motor Speech Disorders Lab

Communicative Disorders and Sciences, University at Buffalo



Regional dialect effects on the perception of gender in children’s voices


Journal article


Christopher E. Holt, Ewa Jacewicz, Robert Fox, Lian J. Arzbecker
Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, vol. 46(1), 2022, p. 060001

DOI
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Cite

APA   Click to copy
Holt, C. E., Jacewicz, E., Fox, R., & Arzbecker, L. J. (2022). Regional dialect effects on the perception of gender in children’s voices. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, 46(1), 060001.


Chicago/Turabian   Click to copy
Holt, Christopher E., Ewa Jacewicz, Robert Fox, and Lian J. Arzbecker. “Regional Dialect Effects on the Perception of Gender in Children’s Voices.” Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 46, no. 1 (2022): 060001.


MLA   Click to copy
Holt, Christopher E., et al. “Regional Dialect Effects on the Perception of Gender in Children’s Voices.” Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, vol. 46, no. 1, 2022, p. 060001.


BibTeX   Click to copy

@article{christopher2022a,
  title = {Regional dialect effects on the perception of gender in children’s voices},
  year = {2022},
  issue = {1},
  journal = {Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics},
  pages = {060001},
  volume = {46},
  author = {Holt, Christopher E. and Jacewicz, Ewa and Fox, Robert and Arzbecker, Lian J.}
}

Abstract

Studies investigating perception of a child’s gender have found that adults can identify the gender of young children accurately before developmental changes in vocal fold size and vocal tract length provide reliable acoustic cues, including fundamental frequency (f0) and formant frequencies. This suggests that judgments about gender in boys’ and girls’ voices may also be influenced by sociocultural and behavioral factors that shape children’s production patterns. We tested whether gender identification in children can be influenced by regional dialect of American English. 26 adults from Central Ohio listened to 620 speech stimuli (comprised of isolated words, read sentences, and spontaneous talks) from 90 children ages 8-11 years representing three dialect regions in the United States (Central Ohio, Southeastern Wisconsin, and Western North Carolina). As predicted, gender was identified more accurately from sentences and spontaneous talk samples than from isolated words. Significant dialect effects were found, but they were manifested differently for younger and older children, and differently as a function of stimulus type. Overall, the results suggest that variations between regional dialects can provide additional cues to gender identification in children’s voices, but these effects are variable and depend on a child’s age, listening context, and dialect of a listener.