Benjamin Munson: Gender and phonetic variation in English

In this talk, I will present the results of two lines of research on gender and phonetic variation.  The first of these examines relationships among gender expression and gendered speech in boys aged 5 to 13.  In this line of research, my colleagues (Janet Pierrehumbert, Ken Zucker, Laura Crocker, Allison Owen-Anderson) and I have shown that boys with a clinical diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder have speech that is less prototypically boy-like than boys without this label.  In this part of the talk, I will discuss the mechanisms that might underlie these differences, and ways to best measure the perception of gender through speech.  The second part of the talk examines how the perception of gender affects the identification of anterior sibilant fricatives.  Strand and Johnson (1996) showed that listeners' phoneme identification can be biased by purely social expectations about how talkers should sound.  This finding has been replicated many times with a variety of social categories, including gender, age, social class, and regional dialect.  In this part, I will talk about how the type of priming affects this process.  In particular, I will discuss the differences between studies with very explicit priming methods (such as presenting a picture of a talker with an obvious attribute, or telling the listeners to imagine that speech was produced by a particular type of talker) versus ones that are very implicit.  I will present some data on s-S categorization that tried to contrast these two types of priming, and discuss better ways to implicitly prime social categories than the method that I used.  

Benjamin Munson er professor ved Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Science, University of Minnesota. Læs mere om Benjamin Munson: http://www.tc.umn.edu/~munso005/