University of Minnesota academics say boys and girls pick up speech cues from adults around them, resulting in differences

The gender of children can be picked up from their speech from as young as five years old, researchers have revealed.

While male and female children have no physiological reason for sounding different before puberty, when changes to the larynx kick in, researchers say boys and girls pick up telltale speech cues from adults around them, resulting in perceptible differences in their speech.

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The team also found that adults heard differences in the speech of boys who prefer male friends and traditionally “male” toys compared with boys who prefer friends of the opposite sex and toys culturally associated with girls. Some of the boys in the latter group had received a diagnosis of gender identity disorder (GID) based on behaviours such as playing with toys traditionally associated with girls, or wanting to wear female clothes or be called by a female name. Gender dysphoria, the currently used term, is now diagnosed only when such behaviour is distressing to the child.

“Even as young as five years of age, those boys are rated as sounding less prototypically boy-like than the boys without the diagnosis, and they are rated as sounding more girl-like” said Prof Ben Munson from the University of Minnesota, who is presenting the work at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Austin, Texas.

The findings are based on research by Munson and colleagues involving 96 children aged between five and 13, who were recorded saying particular words. The team asked adults to listen to the recordings, and rate them on a six point scale as to whether the voices sounded more male or female.

Looking at 28 children without a GID diagnosis, the results reveal that on average boys and girls differed by about one point on the scale for comparable ages. What’s more, on average a difference of about a third of a point was seen between boys with and without a diagnosis, with 25 boys in each group.

Delving deeper using computer software to analyse the speech sounds, the team found that besides perhaps more obvious acoustic factors such as pitch, the way in which children pronounced an “s” appeared to be linked to whether listeners thought the voice was that of a boy or girl.

The team found that adults rated boys who pronounced an “s” in a very crisp, hyper-correct manner as sounding less prototypically boy-like.

“This makes sense because that is the very same ‘s’ that is characteristic of gay male speech styles in the adult population,” said Munson, drawing on something he had identified in previous research.

But the team also found that boys who pronounced an “s” with a lisp were also considered to sound less prototypically boy-like.

That, said Munson, was surprising.

“We never see [that pronunciation] in adult men in gay populations or really in adult men very much at all, or women for that matter,” he said . “But what we do find is that they are very prevalent in stereotypical portrayal of gay men’s speech.”

Munson suggests the findings could help researchers understand where the lisp stereotype comes from, although he noted that the study was based on a self-selected sample of children.

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“Perhaps the reason that we see a higher incidence of the [lisp] in these kids is because the parents were troubled by it because the parents themselves had this stereotype in their minds,” he said.

The team say that when they looked to see which boys were making which pronunciations, they found boys with the GID diagnosis were indeed more likely to pronounce an “s” sound either with a lisp or in a hyper-correct manner, with the former more common in younger boys and the latter more common when the boys were older.

Munson said the study pushed back against traditional theories of language acquisition that, until recently, have suggested that early in life children do not select who they try to copy, but come up with an average of what they have listened to.



“It is evidence that children are picking and choosing among the people they encounter during language acquisition and that they are coming to emulate those people,” he said.

“The take-home message is language variation is pervasive. Seemingly subtle variation in language can convey social meanings learnt from a very early age,” he added.

While Munson said gender dysphoria/GID is a good predictor of who is going to grow up to be a adult gay man, he rejected concerns that speech traits in childhood could be used to predict future sexual orientation, noting there are no long term studies in the area.

Instead, he said, understanding why children pick up sounds from certain people could help researchers aid children who have difficulties learning language.