Social perception of creaky voice in Mandarin Chinese: everyone’s gender matters

Recent years have witnessed increasing interest in the social meanings of non-modal voice qualities, but most existing studies focus on English, especially in the North American context. This paper reports a perceptual study of the social meanings of creaky voice in Mandarin Chinese for mainland Chinese listeners. The study used a large set of resynthesized stimuli including multiple talkers and pairs of utterances differing only in voice quality (creaky vs. modal). Sixty Mandarin listeners completed a social perception experiment in which they collectively evaluated 38 talkers (presented in creaky or modal voice quality) on four socio-demographic dimensions (age, gender, sexuality, education) and 19 traits related to personality (e.g., confident, genuine, pretentious) and communicative style (e.g., engaging). Results of a factor analysis and mixed-effects models indicated multiple effects of creaky voice on the perception of talker age, gender, and warmth; further, these effects interacted with both talker gender and listener gender, in ways that often differed from previously documented patterns for North American English. These findings shed light on the multifaceted indexicality of creaky voice in Mandarin and contribute to mounting evidence of crosslinguistic and crosscultural variation in the social meanings of non-modal voice qualities.