Uncovering the Role of Gender Stereotypes in Speech Perception

Abstract

This work examines the effect of gender stereotypes on the perception of language by drawing together findings from the fields of speech perception, gender studies, and social psychology. Results from two speech perception experiments are reviewed that show that listeners’ stereotypes about gender, as activated by the faces and voices of speakers, alter the listeners’ perception of the fricatives /s/ and /∫/ . One experiment employs auditory-only consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) tokens and the other employs audiovisual stimuli created from the same tokens synthesized with talking faces. This effect of stereotypes on low-level speech processing must be accounted for in models of perception, cognition, and the relationship between the physical and social environment.