Gender and age biases in the assessment of speech accuracy: A study of speech-language clinicians' ratings of /s/ accuracy.
Benjamin Munson, Chloe Wruck, Nina R Benway and 1 others
PMID 39361259WHAT IT FOUND
Speech-language pathologists rated /s/ productions from children assigned female at birth as more accurate than from children assigned male at birth.
The gap widened when age was disclosed, not sex alone. Clinicians should watch age and sex cues.
Key findings
01Clinicians judged /s/ productions from children assigned female at birth as more accurate than productions from children assigned male at birth, even though the researchers' reference ratings of the children's accuracy did not differ by sex assigned at birth.
02The difference between clinicians' ratings for children assigned female and male at birth was larger when the child's age was disclosed, and telling sex alone did not increase the difference compared with no information.
03Clinician experience, pediatric setting, and time spent with children did not predict the size of these age and sex effects.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Only 8 children provided the speech samples, so the result rests on a small set of talkers and may not apply to all children assigned male or female at birth. The words were not identical across the eight children, although vowel context was balanced. Only 95 of 155 people who indicated interest completed the listening task. Participants were US speech-language pathologists recruited through two professional listservs. The authors did not formally analyze the error types clinicians chose, so the 'different type of error' finding is descriptive. Sex label alone did not produce the predicted effect, so the study does not show why age disclosure changed ratings.
Declared interests
The supplied text does not include an author conflict-of-interest declaration. The publication types list research support from N.I.H. Extramural and a non-U.S. government source.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that telling clinicians a child was assigned female at birth makes their /s/ judgments more accurate. Sex alone did not increase the difference compared with no information, and the children's gold-coded accuracy did not differ by sex assigned at birth.