Gender effects in Mandarin creaky voice evaluation: a matched-guise study

Abstract This study investigates how Mandarin listeners evaluate creaky voice across different gendered voices using a matched-guise design. In contrast to findings in American English, where female creak is often evaluated negatively, Mandarin listeners did not display different evaluations of creaky voice based on speaker gender. Personality traits associated with creaky voice, such as attractiveness, competence, likeability, intelligence, and wealth, did not show systematic gender effects in Mandarin, and these dimensions were found to be highly correlated through principal component analysis. These results suggest that the gender bias against creaky female voices observed in American English does not generalize to Mandarin, offering a potential explanation for previously reported crosslinguistic differences in creak identification between American English and Mandarin Chinese. The absence of gender-based social bias in Mandarin may account for listeners’ more phonetically driven identification of creak, making creak more identifiable in low-pitched male voices rather than high-pitched female voices. Taken together, the findings underscore the importance of incorporating social evaluation into speech perception studies and call for further social evaluation studies of creaky voice across various social dimensions and in crosslinguistic contexts.