21 An Investigation on the Effect of Listener’s Percept of Perceived Speaker Gender on Veracity Judgements

Faculty Mentor: Rachel Hayes-Harb (Linguistics, University of Utah)

Listeners make judgments about speech and speakers based on many factors, including the speaker’s racialized appearance (Kang & Rubin, 2009), accent (Ingvalson et al. 2017), and gender (Weibel, Wissmath & Groner 2008). We are interested in the finding that listeners’ willingness to believe the content of speech is influenced by the speaker’s self-identified binary gender (Brann & Himes, 2010). In the present study, we will examine the effect of listener’s beliefs about the speaker’s gender on veracity judgments. We will investigate the relationship between listeners’ assessment of masculine and feminine properties in a speech sample and their willingness to believe the speaker. We seek feedback from the SIPS community on study design and how to best operationalize the listener’s percept of gender in this study. We hope that this research will contribute to a better understanding of how the genderized properties of speech and speakers impact veracity judgments of speech.