Perception of speaker social-indexical information from localised phonetic variants

The present paper investigates perceptions of speaker social-indexical information, including gender, age and social-class, from smaller phonetic segments such as gender-correlated phonetic variants. Since fundamental frequency (F0) is not the only cue to speaker gender identification, the perceptions are examined using gender-ambiguous sounding speech. The results of the study show that while speaker social-indexical information is identifiable at the segmental level, listeners seemed to be more sensitive to certain types of indexical-information