Perception of social-indexical information in gender-ambiguous voices

This thesis presents innovative research which uses gender-ambiguous speech to investigate perceptions of speaker-indexical information. In a series of three perceptual experiments perceptions of speaker age, gender and social class are researched. In Experiment 1 listeners heard audio samples, on the basis of which they were asked to evaluate speaker age, gender and social class using a Visual Analogue Scale. Experiment 2 was performed in the interests of investigating how perceptions of the same speaker-indexical information as in Experiment 1 might be shifted when providing the listener with visual information about the supposed speaker. For example, upon seeing a young female face when hearing a phonetic variant, the listener might rate the variant differently from the answer s/he gave in response to the same stimulus in Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, a new social factor, ethnicity, was introduced. The aim of this experiment was to investigate perceptions of speaker-indexical information when listeners were exposed to visual cues to the ethnicity of the supposed speaker. As Experiment 2, Experiment 3 tested whether speaker-indexical information could be shifted as a result of the manipulation. Furthermore, this research offers a multivariate investigation of perception of speaker-indexical information based on Tyneside English. Perceptions of the variants of the FACE, GOAT and NURSE vowels, T-to-R and variants of /p t k/ are tested. Finally, the findings for groups of listeners with high and lower exposure to Tyneside English are compared and contrasted.