Effects of talker gender on dialect categorization

The identification of the gender of an unfamiliar talker is an easy and automatic process for naive adult listeners. Sociolinguistic research has consistently revealed gender differences in the production of linguistic variables. Research on the perception of dialect variation, however has been limited almost exclusively to male talkers. In the present study, naive participants were asked to categorize unfamiliar talkers by dialect using sentence length utterances under three presentation conditions: male talkers only, female talkers only, and a mixed gender condition. The results revealed no significant differences in categorization performance across the three presentation conditions. However a clustering analysis of the listeners' categorization errors revealed significant effects of talker gender on the underlying perceptual similarity spaces. The present findings suggest that naive listeners are sensitive to gender differences in speech production and are able to use those differences to reliably categorize unfamiliar male and female talkers by dialect.