Perceptual representation of speaker gender in Spanish-English bilingual listeners

The perceptual representation of speaker gender in monolingual English listeners has been found to be gradient and 2-dimensional. However, both gender expression and listener attribution of a speaker’s gender are known to vary by cultural and linguistic norms. Thus, listeners’ attribution of a speaker’s gender is expected to vary based on the cultural and linguistic practices of their community. This study examined the perceptual representation of speaker gender in Spanish-English bilingual listeners at the U.S./Mexico border of El Paso, TX. Twenty-four Spanish-English bilingual speakers of diverse gender identities (e.g., cisgender men, cisgender women, and transgender women) were audio recorded reading sentences from the English and Spanish versions of the Hearing in Noise Test. Nineteen cisgender Spanish-English bilingual listeners completed an auditory free classification paradigm, in which they classified speakers by perceived general similarity and gender identity in both Spanish and English conditions. Multidimensional scaling of listeners’ classifications in each language revealed that listeners organized speakers in a more expansive perceptual space in English (3 dimensions) as compared to Spanish (2 dimensions). Dimension weightings indicated that, in Spanish, listeners placed more emphasis on Dimension 1 as compared to Dimension 2 when classifying speakers, while, in English, listeners equally weighted the 3 dimensions.