How People Perceive Gender Through Speech.

• Position: AUDIOLOGY

Using terminology such as "female" and "male" or "feminine" and "masculine" affects how people perceive gender when hearing someone's voice, according to a study from researchers at New York University's Acoustic Phonetics and Perception Lab. Noting that studies exploring auditory-perception of gender expression use varied terms with regard to gender, the researchers set out to determine how that variation affects perception of a speaker's gender.

They asked 105 participants in the U.S. to listen to recordings of short words spoken and whispered by cis men, cis women, and transfeminine individuals, and rate the speakers on five scales: very female/very male, feminine/masculine, feminine female/masculine male, very feminine/not at all feminine, and very masculine/not at all masculine.

Their findings, published in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, showed that listeners made the smallest distinction between "feminine" and "masculine" as the feminine/masculine scale received the most centered ratings (indicating that raters typically found the speakers' gender more ambiguous). The feminine female/masculine male ratings were the most extreme (closest to the scale's endpoints). The female/male ratings also were among the more extreme results.

"Participants often bring their own definitions for gender terminology, shaped by their cultural understanding of gender," says lead author Nichole Houle. "In many Western, colonial cultures, this may mean that a person is either female or male and there's no space to exist outside of these categories, which was reflected by the...