Gender and speech rate in the perception of competence and social attractiveness

The authors' hypotheses were that (a) listeners regard speakers whose global speech rates they judge to be similar to their own as more competent and more socially attractive than speakers whose rates are different from their own and (b) gender influences those perceptions. Participants were 17 male and 28 female listeners; they judged each of 3 male and 3 female speakers in terms of 10 unipolar adjective scales. The authors used 8 of the scales to derive 2 scores describing the extent to which the listener viewed a speaker as competent and socially attractive. The 2 scores were related by trend analyses (a) to the listeners' perceptions of the speakers' speech rates as compared with their own and (b) to comparisons of the actual speech rates of the speakers and listeners. The authors examined trend components of the data by split-plot multiple regression analyses. In general, the results supported both hypotheses. The participants judged speakers with speech rates similar to their own as more competent and socially attractive than speakers with speech rates slower or faster than their own. However, the ratings of competence were significantly influenced by the gender of the listeners, and those of social attractiveness were influenced by the gender of the listeners and the speakers.     

Ladies and Gentlemen, Women and Men: A Study of the Connotations of Words Indicating Gender

Lakoff's hypothesis about the connotations of the words "lady" and "woman" was investigated by asking college students to rate these words, as well as the masculine words "gentleman" and "man", on several adjective scales. Ratings indicated that the term "gentleman" implied greater competence and warmth than the word "man", while the term "lady" tended to suggest to raters relatively less competence and less warmth than the term "woman" did. Further, it was found that the more formal term ("gentleman", "lady") regardless of gender was described more positively than the less formal term ("man", "woman") on several scales concerned with goodness, politeness, morality, and femininity. Lakoff's hypothesis that "lady" conveys some unique meanings relative to sex role stereotypes thus received support, although some of the connotations of "lady" appear to be due to implied formality rather than to gender features. The degree to which feminine terms were differentiated by raters could be predicted to some extent on the basis of rater characteristics; no significant prediction was possible for the masculine terms.     

Gender and Speech Rate in the Perception of Competence and Social Attractiveness

Abstract

The authors' hypotheses were that (a) listeners regard speakers whose global speech rates they judge to be similar to their own as more competent and more socially attractive than speakers whose rates are different from their own and (b) gender influences those perceptions. Participants were 17 male and 28 female listeners; they judged each of 3 male and 3 female speakers in terms of 10 unipolar adjective scales. The authors used 8 of the scales to derive 2 scores describing the extent to which the listener viewed a speaker as competent and socially attractive. The 2 scores were related by trend analyses (a) to the listeners' perceptions of the speakers' speech rates as compared with their own and (b) to comparisons of the actual speech rates of the speakers and listeners. The authors examined trend components of the data by split-plot multiple regression analyses. In general, the results supported both hypotheses. The participants judged speakers with speech rates similar to their own as more competent and socially attractive than speakers with speech rates slower or faster than their own. However, the ratings of competence were significantly influenced by the gender of the listeners, and those of social attractiveness were influenced by the gender of the listeners and the speakers.     

HYPERFEMININITY AND INFLUENCE

Murnen and Byrne (1991) have defined hyperfemininity as an exaggerated adherence to a feminine gender role as it relates to heterosexual relationships. Hyperfeminine women believe their success is determined by maintaining a romantic relationship with a man, and that their sexuality can be used to maintain this relationship. Extrapolating from theory concerning gender and status, including expectation states theory, it was hypothesized that a woman's expression of hyperfeminine attitudes would lead male college student participants to agree with her in response to a persuasive speech because it would indicate her compliance with women's subordinate status. It was found that men (but not women) who listened to a very hyperfeminine (high) speaker agreed with her more than did men who heard a mildly hyperfeminine (low) speaker, despite the fact that the high hyperfeminine speaker was judged less competent and knowledgeable. Implications of the results, including the idea that the sexual objectification of women perpetuates women's subordinate status, were discussed.     

Impact des contraintes linguistiques et cognitives sur l’acquisition de l’accord en genre de l’adjectif en français écrit

The aim of this research is to show the impact of linguistic (the feminine inflexion was audible or not) and cognitive (the complexity of the task in which the agreement is realized) factors about the acquisition and the use of adjectival gender inflexions in written French. In this perspective, we compared the production of the mark of the agreement in three tasks not mobilizing the same levels of linguistic treatment: transcribe sentences under dictation, recall sentences presented orally, and produce two sentences ending with an adjective from a syntactical priming. The results show that the systematic application of the adjectival agreement in gender is not totally mastered at the end of primary. Besides, the use of the adjectival gender inflexions is more difficult when the written inflexion is mute. Finally, the children forgot more the gender inflexion in written production task than in a dictate or recall task. These results are interpreted within the framework of a functional approach of language production.     

Age and understanding speakers with Spanish or Taiwanese accents

This pilot study concerned the intelligibility of accented speech for listeners of different ages. 72 native speakers of English, representing three age groups (20-39, 40-59, 60 and older) listened to words and sentences produced by native speakers of English, Taiwanese, and Spanish. Listeners transcribed words and sentences. Listeners also rated speakers' comprehensibility, i.e., listeners' perceptions of difficulty in understanding utterances, and accentedness, i.e., how strong a speaker's foreign accent is perceived to be. On intelligibility measures, older adults had significantly greater difficulty in understanding individuals with accented speech than the other two age groups. Listeners, regardless of age, were more likely to provide correct responses if they perceived the speaker easier to understand. Ratings of comprehensibility were highly correlated with ratings of accentedness.     

A Preliminary Investigation into Effects of Linguistic Abstraction on the Perception of Gender in Spoken Language

We investigated the role that linguistic abstraction may play in people’s perceptions of gender in spoken language. In the first experiment, participants told stories about their best friend and romantic partner. Variations in linguistic abstraction and gender-linked adjectives for describing their close others were examined. Participants used significantly more abstract language to describe men compared to women, possibly reflecting a gender stereotype associated with the dispositionality factor of linguistic abstraction. In a second experiment, a new group of participants judged the gender of the protagonists from the stories generated in Experiment 1, after the explicit linguistic gender cues were removed. Consistent with the dispositionality factor, linguistic abstraction moderated the effects of the gender stereotypicality of the context (masculine, feminine, or neutral) on participants’ gender judgments. Discussion focuses on the implications of the results for the communication of gender stereotypes and the effects of linguistic abstraction in more naturalistic language.     

Listeners feel the beat: Entrainment to English and French speech rhythms

Can listeners entrain to speech rhythms? Monolingual speakers of English and French and balanced English–French bilinguals tapped along with the beat they perceived in sentences spoken in a stress-timed language, English, and a syllable-timed language, French. All groups of participants tapped more regularly to English than to French utterances. Tapping performance was also influenced by the participants’ native language: English-speaking participants and bilinguals tapped more regularly and at higher metrical levels than did French-speaking participants, suggesting that long-term linguistic experience with a stress-timed language can differentiate speakers’ entrainment to speech rhythm.     

Sexist language and person perception: Evaluation of candidates from newspaper articles

Use of sexist language significantly affects the evaluation and perception of candidates for office. Simulated newspaper articles describing a candidate were presented to subjects who rated candidates on evaluation and gender-stereotyping measures. Variables of degree of linguistic sexism, stimulus person sex, gender appropriateness of elective office, and subject sex were manipulated in a 2×2×3×2 factorial design. A significant three-way evaluation interaction indicated that linguistic sexism causes women to be negatively evaluated when seeking a “masculine” or “neutral” office. A significant two-way stereotype interaction suggested that linguistic sexism made more salient the gender appropriateness of the offices — candidates running for the “masculine” offices were perceived as more “masculine,” and candidates for the “feminine” offices as more “feminine.”     

Impression formation as a function of the sex role appropriateness of linguistic behavior

Differences between perceptions of men's and women's language were investigated. Undergraduates (64 male, 64 female) read 14 short stories with male or female speakers using seven categories of male and female language. Subjects then rated stimulus persons on 23 sex role related adjectives. Male language was rated as more masculine, less feminine, more instrumental, and less socially positive than female language. Effects were strongest for the categories of expletives and adjectives, followed by weaker effects for hedges and polite forms. Subjects rated males who spoke women's language as homosexual; they tended to rate females who spoke men's language as uppity. The results are discussed in terms of Robin Lakoff's hypotheses concerning linguistic sex differences and in terms of inrole vs out-of-role behavior.The research reported here is based upon a thesis submitted by the first author to Tulane University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Master's degree. The support of Professors Larry Dachowski, William P. Dunlap and Edgar C. O'Neal, members of the thesis committee, is gratefully acknowledged.     

Gender,Race, and Speech Style Stereotypes

Considerable research has shown that people have stereotypical beliefs about the speech and communication style of women and men. There is less research about stereotypes of Black people's speech, and none that jointly or comparably investigates communication stereotypes as a function of both gender and race. In this study, White college students (n = 111) rated a fictional character's speech on 36 pairs of words characteristic of communication style (e.g., emotional–unemotional) and also generated dialogue for the character. Targets' race and sex were varied. Results showed that beliefs about speech style were stronger for race than gender. Black speakers, both women and men, were rated as more direct and emotional, and less socially appropriate and playful, than White speakers. The dialogue generated by participants for Black speakers was less grammatical and more profane than for White speakers. Gender effects were consistent with earlier research but suggest a weakening of stereotypes; women's speech was seen as somewhat less direct and more emotional than men's speech. Beliefs about speech and communication style are important because they may function not only to describe what is but to prescribe what should be in social interaction.     

Effects of backward speech and speaker variability in language discrimination by rats

Human infants use prosodic cues present in speech to extract language regularities, and it has been suggested that this capacity is anchored in more general mechanisms that are shared across mammals. This study explores the extent to which rats can generalize prosodic cues that have been extracted from a training corpus to new sentences and how this discrimination process is affected by the normalization of the sentences when multiple speakers are introduced. Conditions 1 and 2 show rats' abilities to use prosodic cues present in speech, allowing them to discriminate between sentences not previously heard. But this discrimination is not possible when sentences are played backward. Conditions 3 and 4 show that language discrimination by rats is also taxed by the process of speaker normalization. These findings have remarkable parallels with data from human adults, human newborns, and cotton-top tamarins. Implications for speech perception by humans are discussed.     

Perception of spasmodic dysphonia speech in background noise

The purpose of this investigation was to judge whether the Lombard effect, a characteristic change in the acoustical properties of speech produced in noise, existed in adductor spasmodic dysphonia speech, and if so, whether the effect added to or detracted from speaker intelligibility. Intelligibility, as described by Duffy, is the extent to which the acoustic signal produced by a speaker is understood by a listener based on the auditory signal alone. Four speakers with adductor spasmodic dysphonia provided speech samples consisting of low probability sentences from the Speech Perception in Noise test to use as stimuli. The speakers were first tape-recorded as they read the sentences in a quiet speaking condition and were later tape-recorded as they read the same sentences while exposed to background noise. The listeners used as subjects in this study were 50 undergraduate university students. The results of the statistical analysis indicated a significant difference between the intelligibility of the speech recorded in the quiet versus noise conditions (F(1,49) = 57.80, p < or = .001). It was concluded that a deleterious Lombard effect existed for the adductor spasmodic dysphonia speaker group, with the premise that the activation of a Lombard effect in such patients may detract from their overall speech intelligibility.     

The interest gap: how gender stereotype endorsement about abilities predicts differences in academic interests

This study used a novel approach to examine the link between gender ability stereotype endorsement and academic interests by examining not only stereotypes people hold within the domains of mathematics and language arts, but also between them. Grade 6 and 8 students (285 males, 363 females) reported their degree of stereotype endorsement and interest in these two academic domains. Results of path analyses revealed that stereotype endorsement within and between domains accounted for gender differences in interest. In language arts, endorsing a stereotype that females are more competent than males predicted subsequent interest in the domain and accounted for the greater language arts interest among females. In mathematics, however, the perception that males are more competent in mathematics relative to language arts was linked to students’ interest in this domain and accounted for the interest gap between genders. These results suggest that students’ interests relate to endorsed stereotypes that are either driven by a perceived gender superiority within one domain—when females are viewed as more competent than males in language arts—or a gender superiority between two domains—when males are viewed as more competent in mathematics relative to language arts. Considering not only stereotypes favoring a gender within one domain, but also between domains, provides a more accurate portrait of students’ actual stereotypes and can be useful to better understanding how the interest gap emerges.

     

Gender and the integration of acoustic dimensions of prosody: implications for clinical studies.

This study was conducted to detect the existence of a relationship between spectral and temporal prosodic cues and to examine gender differences in any such relationship. The rationale for the investigation was to gain a greater understanding of normal prosody and the requirements for control groups in clinical studies of prosody. Ten male and 10 female speakers with no known speech or neurological deficits participated in the study. They performed a reading task which involved delivering 10 sentences first with a declarative and then repeated with an interrogative intonation (20 sentences per speaker). Intrasubject and intersubject analyses of the speech data revealed a dependence of pitch on duration that differed between male and female speakers. Significant differences between the genders were also found in speech rate, pitch range, and pitch slope. The findings suggest that an integrated treatment of acoustic cues may provide a more invariant feature of normal prosody against which clinical groups may be compared. The data also imply that in clinical studies of the production of prosody gender should be carefully controlled.     

Effects of Gendered Language on Gender Stereotyping in Computer‐Mediated Communication: The Moderating Role of Depersonalization and Gender‐Role Orientation

This experiment examined what situational and dispositional features moderate the effects of linguistic gender cues on gender stereotyping in anonymous, text‐based computer‐mediated communication. Participants played a trivia game with an ostensible partner via computer, whose comments represented either prototypically masculine or feminine language styles. Consistent with the social identity model of deindividuation effects, those who did not exchange brief personal profiles with their partner (i.e., depersonalization) were more likely to infer their partner’s gender from the language cues than those who did. Depersonalization, however, facilitated stereotype‐consistent conformity behaviors only among gender‐typed individuals; that is, participants conformed more to their masculine‐ than feminine‐comment partners, and men were less conforming than were women, only when they were both gender‐typed and depersonalized.     

Do age and linguistic background alter the audiovisual advantage when listening to speech in the presence of energetic and informational masking?

We examined how the type of masker presented in the background affected the extent to which visual information enhanced speech recognition, and whether the effect was dependent on or independent of age and linguistic competence. In the present study, young speakers of English as a first language (YEL1) and English as a second language (YEL2), as well as older speakers of English as a first language (OEL1), were asked to complete an audio (A) and an audiovisual (AV) speech recognition task in which they listened to anomalous target sentences presented against a background of one of three masker types (noise, babble, and competing speech). All three main effects were found to be statistically significant (group, masker type, A vs. AV presentation type). Interesting two-way interactions were found between masker type and group and between masker type and presentation type; however, no interactions were found between group (age and/or linguistic competence) and presentation type (A vs. AV). The results of this study, while they shed light on the effect of masker type on the AV advantage, suggest that age and linguistic competence have no significant effects on the extent to which a listener is able to use visual information to improve speech recognition in background noise.     

INSTRUMENTAL AND EXPRESSIVE TRAITS, TRAIT STEREOTYPES, AND SEXIST ATTITUDES What Do They Signify?

College students rated die typical male and female student and themselves on 22 instrumental (I) and 16 expressive (E) items from the PAQ (Spence & Helmreich, 1978) and the BSRI (Bern, 1974), as well as on the BSRI items "masculine" and "feminine." They also completed measures of gender stereotypes and sexist attitudes. Significant gender stereotypes were found on all but two I and E items in both genders. Significant gender differences in self-report were found on all the E items but on only 41% of the I items, confirming our hypotheses that societal changes have led women to develop more agentic self-conceptions. The pattern of relationships found between the self-report, stereotype, and attitude measures supports the utility of a multidimensional approach to gender. Responses to the items "masculine" and "feminine" confirm the implications of our hypothesis that these items primarily assess men's and women's basic sense of gender identity.     

Discriminating languages by speech-reading

The goal of this study was to explore the ability to discriminate languages using the visual correlates of speech (i.e., speech-reading). Participants were presented with silent video clips of an actor pronouncing two sentences (in Catalan and/or Spanish) and were asked to judge whether the sentences were in the same language or in different languages. Our results established that Spanish-Catalan bilingual speakers could discriminate running speech from their two languages on the basis of visual cues alone (Experiment 1). However, we found that this ability was critically restricted by linguistic experience, since Italian and English speakers who were unfamiliar with the test languages could not successfully discriminate the stimuli (Experiment 2). A test of Spanish monolingual speakers revealed that knowledge of only one of the two test languages was sufficient to achieve the discrimination, although at a lower level of accuracy than that seen in bilingual speakers (Experiment 3). Finally, we evaluated the ability to identify the language by speech-reading particularly distinctive words (Experiment 4). The results obtained are in accord with recent proposals arguing that the visual speech signal is rich in informational content, above and beyond what traditional accounts based solely on visemic confusion matrices would predict.     

Adolescent Females' Idolization of Male Media Stars as a Transition Into Sexuality

The purpose of this study was to test the contention that feminine media stars who are idolized by adolescent girls provide a safe target of romantic love in the period of time before girls start dating and become sexually active. Girls in heterogeneous 7th and 9th grade classes in an Israeli urban center responded to a questionnaire about media stars, attributed feminine characteristics to feminine, masculine, and neutral media stars, and answered questions about having and desiring a boyfriend. There were more consensual choices of feminine idols than of nonfeminine idols. Girls who have or want a boyfriend chose nonfeminine idols whereas girls who do not currently want a boyfriend chose feminine idols. Girls with a nonfeminine idol who want a boyfriend and girls with a feminine idol who do not want a boyfriend attributed greater femininity to masculine and neutral stars. Finally, girls who did not want a boyfriend and attributed feminine characteristics to movie stars evidenced more negative attitudes toward sex. Although the number of posters of both feminine and nonfeminine idols correlated with the amount of time spent talking about the idol, the less consensual the idol, the more time was spent talking about him. Girls with a nonfeminine idol who hang posters of their idol indicated greater excitement when thinking about the idol and more jealousy of their idol's real and on screen relations. The findings were interpreted in the context of feeling norms and the need to practice these norms on safe love-objects.