Trans Woman’s Voice A Study of Correlation between Voice Onset Time in Thai Plosive Consonants and Gender Construction
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Abstract
The objectives of this study are 1) to analyze voice onset time in Thai plosive consonants, namely voiced, voiceless unaspirated and vo iceless aspirated plosives, produced by trans women with comparison to those of males and females; and 2) to investigate the trans woman’s gender construction in terms of femininity index and the correlation between voice onset time and femininity index. One-way Anova was used to test differences among the
voice onset time produced by the three groups. A five-level Likert questionnaire with questions reflecting sexual identity and sexuality was employed to collect the data to calculate the femininity index. The correlation between voice onset time and femininity index was statistically tested by Pearson correlation.
The results reveal that the duration of voice onset time in trans women is significantly longer than male and female at p < 0.01. The voiced plosives and the voiceless aspirated plosives have a positive correlatio n with the femininity index at p < 0.01 whereas the correlation is not found in the voiceless unaspirated plosives. The findings point out characteristics of trans women’s voices which are divergent from males and females’ voices and within-group
variation of trans women’s voices related to gender construction.
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