Listener Expectations and Gender Bias in Nonsibilant Fricative Perception
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The nonsibilant English fricatives /f/ and /θ / are known to be acoustically nonrobust. Using /f/ and /θ/ stimuli produced in CV, VCV, and VC syllables in /i α u/ contexts spoken by 10 talkers (5 male), we first replicate previous research suggesting that the most robust cues to this contrast are in the formant transitions in adjacent vowels. We also demonstrate vowel and syllable contextual differences that point to the contrast being most robust in /u/ contexts. In a series of perception experiments we go on to demonstrate effects of bias on perception of /f/ and /θ/ that derive from the uninformative nature of the frication noise, making them vulnerable to misperception in general, and especially in low-saliency contexts where the formant transition information is less robust. In experiment 1, listeners' classification of /f/ and /θ/ demonstrated a general bias to respond /f/ for fricatives produced by females and /θ/ for those produced by males. We hypothesize that the perceived concentrations of spectral energy in the fricative are shifted based on the concentration of energy in the vowel, which depend on a talker's gender. In experiment 2, vowel and frication noise portions were cross-spliced to probe this effect, resulting in the same gender-based bias. In a final experiment the vocalic information was removed and only the frication noise was presented to listeners for classification. In this task there was a general bias for /f/, regardless of the talker gender. Overall we demonstrate topdown gender effects in perception that originate in the strong indexical properties of adjacent vowels rather than being present in the frication noise itself.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it