Late Acquisition of Gendered Phonetics: Voice Feminization in Transgender Women
With vowel data from 19 trans women participants, each of whom self-identifies as having feminized their voice, e.g. can produce forms of speech that would be perceived as both ‘physiologically male’ and ‘physiologically female’, I find evidence of wholesale vocal tract manipulation in nearly every dimension. I focus in particular on more robust, i.e. less sensitive to the area function, indicators of vocal tract length, namely the higher formants, including F4. Linear mixed effects analyses of the relationship between formant frequency and what I am calling ‘register difference’ were performed, demonstrating a significant effect of register on each formant F1-F4. The effect of register on frequency of F1-F4 was successively higher, suggesting an overall manipulation of vocal tract length apart from variable articulatory setting. These patterns have bearing on vowel normalization techniques, automated speaker identification, and theories of style within variationist study.
