Listener Age and Gender Diversity: Effects on Voice-based Perception of Gender.
Katherine M Brown, Kimberly L Dahl, Gabriel J Cler and 1 others
PMID 32165021WHAT IT FOUND
Listener age and gender identity did not change how people judged the gender of a transmasculine speaker's voice.
All groups rated the voice as female early in hormone therapy and male later, with no significant differences between young adults, older adults, or gender-diverse listeners.
Key findings
01Mean gender ratings were highly correlated across young cisgender adults, older cisgender adults, and gender-diverse adults, indicating no significant difference in perception based on listener characteristics.
02All listener groups rated the speaker as consistently female through week 14 of hormone replacement therapy and consistently male after week 28.
03The study was exploratory and involved only 30 listeners rating one single transmasculine speaker, limiting generalizability to other voices or populations.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study involved only one transmasculine speaker, so results cannot be generalized to all transmasculine voices. The sample size was small (30 listeners total), and the study was exploratory rather than powered to detect subtle differences. All participants were from the greater Boston area, limiting the generalizability of findings to other cultural or geographic settings. The task relied solely on auditory cues, excluding visual information which also plays a role in gender perception. Older adults were recruited with relaxed hearing thresholds to accommodate age-related hearing loss, which may have influenced their performance or the comparability of groups.
Declared interests
None reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the lack of difference between listener groups as evidence that age or gender identity never affects voice perception. This was a small exploratory study using a single speaker, so it cannot rule out effects in larger samples or with different voices.