Perceptual Cue Weighting Is Influenced by the Listener's Gender and Subjective Evaluations of the Speaker: The Case of English Stop Voicing

Abstract

Speech categories are defined by multiple acoustic dimensions and their boundaries are generally fuzzy and ambiguous in part because listeners often give differential weighting to these cue dimensions during phonetic categorization. This study explored how a listener's perception of a speaker's socio-indexical and personality characteristics influences the listener's perceptual cue weighting. In a matched-guise study, three groups of listeners classified a series of gender-neutral /b/-/p/ continua that vary in VOT and F0 at the onset of the following vowel. Listeners were assigned to one of three prompt conditions (i.e., a visually male talker, a visually female talker, or audio-only) and rated the talker in terms of vocal (and facial, in the visual prompt conditions) gender prototypicality, attractiveness, friendliness, confidence, trustworthiness, and gayness. Male listeners and listeners who saw a male face showed less reliance on VOT compared to listeners in the other conditions. Listeners' visual evaluation of the talker also affected their weighting of VOT and onset F0 cues, although the effects of facial impressions differ depending on the gender of the listener. The results demonstrate that individual differences in perceptual cue weighting are modulated by the listener's gender and his/her subjective evaluation of the talker. These findings lend support for exemplar-based models of speech perception and production where socio-indexical features are encoded as a part of the episodic traces in the listeners' mental lexicon. This study also shed light on the relationship between individual variation in cue weighting and community-level sound change by demonstrating that VOT and onset F0 co-variation in North American English has acquired a certain degree of socio-indexical significance.

Keywords: English stop voicing; cue weighting; gender; paralinguistic information; personality traits; sociophonetics; speech perception; subjective evaluations.

Figure 1

Correlations between the ratings across different vocal attributes. Each point corresponds to the ratings of a participant. ^***p < 0.001; ^*p < 0.05.

Figure 2

Model 1 predictions of the probability of a /p/ response (y axis) at different steps on the VOT continuum (x axis) and F0 targets. The error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals.

Figure 3

Model 1 predictions of the probability of a /p/ response (y axis) at different steps along the VOT continuum (x axis) and across the three prompt conditions. The error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals.

Figure 4

Model 1 predictions of the probability of a /p/ response (y axis) at different steps along the VOT continuum (x axis) by the gender of the participants. The error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals.

Figure 5

Correlations between the ratings across different visual attributes. Each point corresponds to the ratings of a participant. ^***p < 0.001; ^*p < 0.05.

Figure 6

Model 2 predictions of the probability of a /p/ response (y axis) in different F0 onset conditions according to the talker's visual appeal (x axis). The error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals.

Figure 7

Model 2 predictions of the probability of a /p/ response (y axis) at different steps along the VOT continuum (x axis) according to the participant's gender as well as the talker's visual appeal. While Visual Appeal is continuous, for ease of presentation, only the patterns of talkers with high visual appeal (i.e., 2 standard deviation above the mean) vs. low visual appeal (2 standard deviation below the mean) are shown in the figure. The error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals.

Figure 8

Model 2 predictions of the probability of a /p/ response (y axis) at different steps on the VOT continuum (x axis) and F0 targets according to the talker's visual appeal and the gender of the participant. While Visual Appeal is continuous, for ease of presentation, only the patterns of talkers who were rated by the participated as having high visual appeal (i.e., 2 standard deviation above the mean) vs. those with low visual appeal (2 standard deviation below the mean) are shown in the figure. The error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals.