Lexical characteristic mediate the influence of sex and sex typicality on vowel-space size

Abstract

Sex differences in vowel acoustics were found to be mediated by words' frequency of use and phonological neighborhood density. Larger sex differences in vowel-space expansion were found for words with high frequency of use and for words with small phonological neighborhoods, than for words than for words with low frequency of use and high neighborhood density. Results suggest that talkers' production of social-indexical variants is constrained by the influence these might have on word recognition.