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Purpose: The study of gender and speech has historically excluded studies of transmasculine individuals. Consequently, generalizations about speech and gender are based on cisgender individuals. This lack of representation hinders clinical training and clinical service delivery, particularly by speech-language pathologists providing gender-affirming communication services. This letter describes a new corpus of the speech of American English–speaking transmasculine men, transmasculine nonbinary people, and cisgender men that is open and available to clinicians and researchers. Method: Twenty masculine-presenting native English speakers from the Upper Midwestern United States (including cisgender men, transmasculine men, and transmasculine nonbinary people) were recorded, producing three sets of speech materials: Consensus Auditory–Perceptual Evaluation of Voice sentences, the Rainbow Passage, and a novel set of sentences developed for this project. Acoustic measures vowels (overall formant frequency scaling, vowel– space dispersion, fundamental frequency, breathiness), consonants (voice onset time of word-initial voiceless stops, spectral moments of word-initial/s/), and the entire sentence (rate of speech) that were made. Results: The acoustic measures reveal a wide range for all dependent measures and low correlations among the measures. Results show that many of the voices depart considerably from the norms for men’s speech in published studies. Conclusion: This new corpus can be used to illustrate different ways of sounding masculine by speech-language pathologists performing gender-affirming communication services and by higher education teachers as examples of diverse ways of sounding masculine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This investigation examined the effect of repeated exposure to novel and repeated spoken words in typical environments on the intelligibility of 2 synthesized voices and human recorded speech in preschools. Method: Eighteen preschoolers listened to and repeated single words presented in human-recorded speech, DECtalk Paul, and AT&T Voice Michael during 5 experimental sessions. Stimuli consisted of repeated and novel words presented in each speech output condition during each session. Sessions took place in the presence of typically occurring noise in classroom or home settings. Results: There was a significant main effect for voice as participants accurately identified significantly more words in the human-recorded speech and AT&T Voice than in the DECtalk speech output condition. When averaged across speech output conditions, children increased their accuracy as they participated in additional sessions. There was a statistically significant interaction between session and voice. DECtalk had a slightly larger effect of session than did AT&T Voice and human-recorded speech. (Contains 4 tables and 2 figures.)

Purpose: This study examined whether experienced speech-language pathologists (SLPs) differ from inexperienced people in their perception of phonetic detail in children's speech. Method: Twenty-one experienced SLPs and 21 inexperienced listeners participated in a series of tasks in which they used a visual-analog scale (VAS) to rate children's natural productions of target /s/-/[theta]/, /t/-/k/, and /d/-/g/ in word-initial position. Listeners rated the perceived distance between individual productions and ideal productions. Results: The experienced listeners' ratings differed from the inexperienced listeners' ratings in four ways: They had higher intrarater reliability, showed less bias toward a more frequent sound, and were more closely related to the acoustic characteristics of the children's speech. In addition, the experienced listeners' responses were related to a different set of predictor variables. Conclusion: Results suggest that experience working as an SLP leads to better perception of phonetic detail in children's speech. Limitations and future research are discussed. (Contains 4 figures, 2 tables and 2 footnotes.)

Two experiments examined whether listening to multiple presentations of recorded speech stimuli influences the reliability and accuracy of judgments of children's speech production accuracy. In Experiment 1, 10 listeners phonetically transcribed words produced by children with phonological impairments after a single presentation and after the word was played 7 times. Inter- and intratranscriber reliability in the single- and multiple-presentation conditions did not differ significantly. In Experiment 2, 18 listeners provided binary correct/incorrect judgments of /s/ accuracy in single- and multiple-presentation conditions. There was no systematic effect of presentation condition on either accuracy or intrarater reliability. However, greater interrater reliability was noted in the multiple-presentation condition, particularly for tokens of /s/ that were incorrect or acoustically intermediate between an incorrect and a correct /s/. Taken together, the results suggest that multiple presentations have no measurable effect on the accuracy and intrarater reliability of judgments of children's phonetic accuracy, but that they do have a small effect on interrater reliability. Clinical implications are discussed.