Role of speaker gender in toddler lexical processing

Adults and children utilize social category information during incremental language processing. Gender is a particularly salient social category that is often marked both in speakers' voices and the visual world. However, it is unknown whether toddlers exploit gender cues to draw connections between language and other aspects of their environment. The current study investigates whether toddlers use gender cues available in voices and objects during real-time language processing. 22- to 24-month-old toddlers (N = 38) were tested in a looking-while-listening paradigm. On each trial, toddlers viewed two highly familiar objects designed to be prototypically masculine and feminine (via color and patterns) and heard either a male or female speaker label the target object. Lexical processing was facilitated when the vocal gender matched the gender of the target object. This work demonstrates that toddlers consider both object-feature information and inferred speaker gender (based on speaker' voice) during online language processing.