Social associations between voices and words affect learning

The present study investigates whether the relationship between voice gender (female and male voices) and gender-associated meanings (e.g., flower [female] vs. football [male]) influences learning of an artificial lexicon after brief auditory exposure. Participants were trained on 16 novel words in either a gender-aligning condition (i.e., female voices produced novel words with female-associated meanings and male voices produced novel words with male-associated meanings) or a gender-mismatching condition (e.g., female voices produced words with male-associated meanings, etc.). Listeners either heard voices that contain stereotypical or non-stereotypical gross acoustic patterns. Listeners showed worse word learning in gender-mismatching conditions. And, learning performance was mediated by voice stereotypicality. This study demonstrates how gender associations implicitly modulate social attention when learning a new language. Also, since the experiment was under the guise of a language learning application, the results also have implications for gender biases in human-computer interaction and speech technology. More broadly, these findings demonstrate the impact of gender associations on speech perception and language learning.