The human brain is excellent at understanding speech even though it is actually a very complicated process. Speech perception is challenging because each person we come in contact with speaks slightly differently. How are we so successful? We are able to learn how men and women tend to pronounce speech and can use that knowledge to overcome differences in peoples’ speech. My dissertation examines how a talker’s gender influences speech perception. My experiments show that talker gender actually changes how we hear speech at the most fundamental level.