Word and Gender Identification in the Speech of Transgender Individuals.
Kristina A Doyle, Daphna Harel, Graham T Feeny and 2 others
PMID 39019670WHAT IT FOUND
When trans women's speech was altered to have a gender-neutral pitch, listeners confused the words more often.
Tokens identified as the wrong word were rated less feminine, suggesting listeners use perceived gender to guess the intended vowel.
Key findings
01Tokens identified incorrectly by most listeners were associated with lower femininity ratings than tokens identified correctly.
02Word identification accuracy did not differ significantly across formant shift conditions (shifted-up, shifted-down, unshifted).
03Trans women's synthetically manipulated speech received a median gender rating of 0.56, indicating successful generation of gender-ambiguous stimuli.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study used isolated words rather than connected speech, which likely overestimates the potential for confusion. The sample of trans women was small (n=12) and heterogeneous in age and transition history. One participant was a non-native English speaker, though excluding them did not change results. The cis male and female samples were not synthetically altered, creating a methodological difference between groups.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that formant modification training is ineffective or harmful to intelligibility. The lack of significant difference between shift conditions suggests that the small acoustic changes made during training do not reliably impair word recognition, even though listeners used gender cues to help identify vowels.