Toddlers Use Vocal Cues to Infer Male Dominance Over Females in Right-of-Way Conflict

Men hold more power compared to women, a phenomenon that is globally evident and widely documented. Preverbal infants mentally represent social dominance, and by the age of 18 months can distinguish male and female voices and associate them with faces of the corresponding gender. Here, we investigated whether 18- to 24- month-old toddlers (N=48) expected male-voiced agents to prevail over female-voiced ones in a right-of-way conflict. Using a violation-of-expectation paradigm, we found that toddlers looked longest when female-voiced characters prevailed in dominance conflicts, suggesting they expected that male-voiced agents would prevail instead. Acoustic features of male voices that perceptually suggest greater formidability/physical size (i.e., lower fundamental frequency) may account for this effect. Alternatively, vocal indicators of speaker sex might trigger very early conceptualizations about gender and dominance.