Jan 12
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Strand:1999
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Page 87: Strand mentioned "culture-specific conventions about habitual
postures of the voice and vocal tract for different genders". What do
they entail? How can they be clearly distinguished from other
gender-specific acoustic differences?

Page 91: During Strand and Johnson's (1996) experiment, wouldn't the
gender-related crossing of faces and voices elicit a significant
amount of confusion, with listeners considering the faces as
unsuitable for the respective voices?

Page 94: Is it possible to minimize the effects of stereotypes on
reality perception?

Strand and Johnson briefly talk about how the link between facial
features and gender stereotypes is culturally specific -- if the
cultural expectations are swapped (i.e. features associated with women
instead associated with men), could/would this result in a different
outcome?

What would a pre-test look like for seeing if the synthesized stimuli
of shod and sod were accepted by naive listeners as sounding like
naturally produced speech? (was that necessary for this study?)

I'm surprised that previous theories of speech perception didn't
consider listener's social expectations, since it seems to be a
prevalent factor in speech perception (and social
expectations/stereotypes take place via perception of people over
time).

In the study by Strand and Johnson (1996), before the auditory stimuli
were constructed, listeners had to judge 37 voices based on gender
prototypicality. I wonder what the relationship is between vocal tract
length and judged prototypicality. Since body height is correlated
with vocal tract length, it would be interesting to know whether the
most prototypically male sounding voice also has the longest vowel
tract/ is the tallest person and vice versa.  What I found remarkable
was that children acquire specific gendered pronunciations very early
in the process of language acquisition.

How do gender stereotypes influence the perception of speech,
specifically focusing on the case of fricatives /s/ and /S/?  What are
the implications of these findings for models of speech perception,
cognition, and the relationship between the physical and social
environment?