Spectral analysis of strident fricatives in cisgender and transfeminine speakers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The spectral features of /s/ and /ʃ/ carry important sociophonetic information regarding a speaker's gender. Often, gender is misclassified as a binary of male or female, but this excludes people who may identify as transgender or nonbinary. In this study, we use a more expansive definition of gender to investigate the acoustics (duration and spectral moments) of /s/ and /ʃ/ across cisgender men, cisgender women, and transfeminine speakers in voiced and whispered speech and the relationship between spectral measures and transfeminine gender expression. We examined /s/ and /ʃ/ productions in words from 35 speakers (11 cisgender men, 17 cisgender women, 7 transfeminine speakers) and 34 speakers (11 cisgender men, 15 cisgender women, 8 transfeminine speakers), respectively. In general, /s/ and /ʃ/ center of gravity was highest in productions by cisgender women, followed by transfeminine speakers, and then cisgender men speakers. There were no other gender-related differences. Within transfeminine speakers, /s/ and /ʃ/ center of gravity and skewness were not related to the time proportion expressing their feminine spectrum gender or their Trans Women Voice Questionnaire scores. Taken together, the acoustics of /s/ and /ʃ/ may signal gender group identification but may not account for within-gender variation in transfeminine gender expression.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".