Abstract
Recent years have witnessed increasing interest in the social meanings of non-modal voice qualities, but most existing studies focus on English, especially in the North American context. This paper reports a perceptual study of the social meanings of creaky voice in Mandarin Chinese for mainland Chinese listeners. The study used a large set of resynthesized stimuli including multiple talkers and pairs of utterances differing only in voice quality (creaky vs. modal). Sixty Mandarin listeners completed a social perception experiment in which they collectively evaluated 38 talkers (presented in creaky or modal voice quality) on four socio-demographic dimensions (age, gender, sexuality, education) and 19 traits related to personality (e.g., confident, genuine, pretentious) and communicative style (e.g., engaging). Results of a factor analysis and mixed-effects models indicated multiple effects of creaky voice on the perception of talker age, gender, and warmth; further, these effects interacted with both talker gender and listener gender, in ways that often differed from previously documented patterns for North American English. These findings shed light on the multifaceted indexicality of creaky voice in Mandarin and contribute to mounting evidence of crosslinguistic and crosscultural variation in the social meanings of non-modal voice qualities.
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Data availability
Datasets and supplementary files related to the current study are available in the OSF repositories https://osf.io/srp7u and https://osf.io/cejgf. The repositories include: (1) datasets and statistical analysis reports (including R scripts and full model outputs) that allow readers to replicate the analyses reported in the paper; (2) the list of questions (with annotations) in the social perception experiment; (3) the list of sentences used to elicit natural speech recordings; and (4) a description of the resynthesis process using a Klatt synthesizer.
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Acknowledgements
This research is supported by grant no. 15611322 awarded to PI Yao Yao by the Research Grants Council (General Research Fund) of Hong Kong. The authors thank Shiyue Li and Ka Keung Lee for their assistance with recording and annotating speech data. We thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback in the review process.
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Y.Y. and C.B.C. conceived the experiment; Y.Y. and C.B.C. acquired funding; Y.Y. and C.B.C. obtained ethics approval; Y.Y. and M.L. created the stimulus materials; Y.Y. and M.L. conducted the experiment; Y.Y. and C.B.C. curated the data; Y.Y. and M.L. analyzed the results; and Y.Y. and C.B.C. wrote the original draft of the manuscript. All authors contributed to designing the experiment and to manuscript review and editing.
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The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University on Apr 6, 2022 (ethics approval number HSEAR20220405004). The approval covered all work reported in this article. All study protocols were performed in accordance with the ethical standards of the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments.
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Yao, Y., Li, M. & Chang, C.B. Social perception of creaky voice in Mandarin Chinese: everyone’s gender matters. Humanit Soc Sci Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-07108-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-07108-z
