Gender effects in Mandarin creaky voice evaluation: a matched-guise study
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Aini Li
und
Wei Lai
Abstract
This study investigates how Mandarin listeners evaluate creaky voice across different gendered voices using a matched-guise design. In contrast to findings in American English, where female creak is often evaluated negatively, Mandarin listeners did not display different evaluations of creaky voice based on speaker gender. Personality traits associated with creaky voice, such as attractiveness, competence, likeability, intelligence, and wealth, did not show systematic gender effects in Mandarin, and these dimensions were found to be highly correlated through principal component analysis. These results suggest that the gender bias against creaky female voices observed in American English does not generalize to Mandarin, offering a potential explanation for previously reported crosslinguistic differences in creak identification between American English and Mandarin Chinese. The absence of gender-based social bias in Mandarin may account for listeners’ more phonetically driven identification of creak, making creak more identifiable in low-pitched male voices rather than high-pitched female voices. Taken together, the findings underscore the importance of incorporating social evaluation into speech perception studies and call for further social evaluation studies of creaky voice across various social dimensions and in crosslinguistic contexts.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Nicole Holliday and Jianjing Kuang for their input during the early development of this project. We also appreciate the helpful suggestions from the two anonymous reviewers. An earlier version of this work was presented at LSA 2023 and NWAV-AP7, and we thank the audience for their valuable feedback.
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© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial 2025
- Research Articles
- Vowel formant track normalization using discrete cosine transform coefficients
- Asymmetry in French speech-in-noise perception: the effects of native dialect and cross-dialectal exposure
- Direct pseudo-partitives in US English
- A baseline for object clitic climbing in Italian
- Semantic granularity in derivation
- Shared processing strategies as a mechanism for contact-induced change in flexible constituent order
- The (non)canonical status of the ka- passive in Balinese
- A comparative study of 时 si 2 /shi 2 in Meixian Hakka and Ancient Chinese using the Minimalist Program
- A quantitative method for syntactic gradience: words, phrases, and the constructions in between
- Yeah, but how? Operationalizing the functions of the discourse-pragmatic marker yeah
- Hotspots for acoustic politeness in Korean and Japanese deferential speech
- How fast is fast and how slow is slow in mental simulation? Two rating studies on Estonian speed adverbs
- Discourse effects in processing Chinese reflexive pronouns
- Attitudinal negotiation: the analysis of online commentary videos about an international event on Chinese social media platform bilibili.com
- Crosslinguistic constructions and strategies: where do concessive conditionals fit in?
- Recurring patterns in tone (chain) shift
- Null pronoun interpretation probed via thematic role ambiguity: a case in Korean
- Experimental investigation on quantifier scope in Chinese relative clauses
- Sensitivity to honorific agreement: a window into predictive processing
- The negative concord illusion: an acceptability study with Czech neg-words
- Expletive negation in Italian temporal clauses: an acceptability judgement and a self-paced reading study
- Effects of information structure on pronoun resolution: the number of pronouns matters
- The cognitive processing of nouns and verbs in second language reading: an eye-tracking study
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- Effects of crosslinguistic influence in definiteness acquisition: comparing HL-English and HL-Russian bilingual children acquiring Hebrew
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- My Memoji, my self: prosodic correlates of online performed code-switching via avatar
- Gender effects in Mandarin creaky voice evaluation: a matched-guise study
- Narrating the doctoral journey on Chinese social media: chronotopes and scales in user interaction on Xiaohongshu
- Salient Language in Context (SLIC): a web app for collecting real-time attention data in response to audio samples
- Children’s emerging sociolinguistic expectations around social roles: a triangulated approach
- Situating speakers in change: a methodology for quantifying degree and direction of change over the lifespan
- Testing the effect of speech separation on vowel formant estimates
- Researching dialects with high school students: a citizen science approach
- Sociolinguistic research projects as brands
- Do readers perceive various types of knowledge expressed through evidentials in news reports with different degrees of certainty?
- Quantitative relationship between distribution of sentence length and dependency distance in Spanish
- Large corpora and large language models: a replicable method for automating grammatical annotation
- Using ATLAS.ti for constructing and analysing multimodal social media corpora
- Exploring the effect of semantic diversity on boundary permeability in verb/noun heterosemy using deep contextualized word embedding
- Communicative pressures influence the use of adverbs as well as adjectives: evidence from a crosslinguistic investigation
- Non-signers favor two-handed gestures when expressing inherently plural meanings
- Encoding Chinese metaphorical motion: a typological perspective
- Frequency does not predict the processing speed of multi-morpheme sequences in Japanese
- Did he lead monologues or did he talk to himself? How typological distance between source and target language influences the preservation of metaphorical mappings in translation
- How long is too long? Production-internal and communicative constraints in the coding of conditionality in Spanish
- Long English objects and short Chinese objects: language diversity shaped by cognitive universality
- Corrigendum
- Corrigendum to: Sign recognition: the effect of parameters and features in sign mispronunciations
