A B S T R A C TThis article examines how social stereotypes influence listeners' perceptions of indexical language. Building on recent developments in linguistics and social psychology, I investigate the extent to which stereotypical attitudes and beliefs about categories of speakers serve to enable the association of linguistic features with particular social meanings while simultaneously blocking others. My arguments are based on an analysis of listener perceptions of the intersecting categories of gender, sexuality, and social class among men in the UK. Using a modified matched-guise paradigm to test three category-relevant variables (mean pitch, spectral characteristics of /s/, and TH-fronting), I demonstrate how the perception of social meaning is governed by a combination of both attitudinal and cognitive factors. This finding is important because it illustrates the listener-dependent nature of sociolinguistic perception. Moreover, it also provides further empirical support for an understanding of social meaning as an emergent property of language-in-use. (speech perception, attitudes and stereotypes, sexuality, phonetic variation)*

This article describes a controlled experiment designed to determine what people listen to specifically when judging a speaker's sexuality. Four experimental stimuli were produced by digitally shortening the syllable duration and narrowing the pitch of one male speaker reading a passage. Listeners rated various combinations of the four stimuli on 10 affective scales, including straight/gay and effeminate/masculine. Altering the two variables was insufficient to alter listeners' perceptions of the speaker's sexuality to a level of significance. However, significant correlations between the different attitudinal scales illustrated that perceptions of sexuality are ideologically linked to other perceptions of personality and personhood.

A B S T R A C TThis article illustrates the use of an empirical method for examining the perceptual identification of gayness in male speakers. It demonstrates how, by digitally manipulating the speech of isolated individuals, it is possible to obtain reliable evidence that pitch range and sibilant duration may act as indexical of a gay male identity. Further scrutiny of this result, however, illustrates that linguistic indexicality is not as straightforward as it originally appears. Subsequent analyses of the data highlight the ways in which the perceptual evaluation of sexuality is a highly contingent process, dependent upon a variety of sociolinguistic factors. An envelope of variation in listeners' affective judgments of a speaker is shown to exist, and it is argued that research on the perception of identity must go beyond identification of salient features, and also consider when and why these features are not salient. (Prosody, perception, sexuality and gender, contextualization) 1 I N T R O D U C T I O NThere is a common intuition among native speakers of American English that it is possible to identify the sexuality of individuals simply by listening to their speech. Consequently, numerous sociolinguists, linguistic anthropologists, and speech pathologists over the past 30 years have attempted to quantify this intuition, and, in so doing, to identify precisely what aspects of a speech signal listeners attune to when making judgments of a speaker's sexuality (see Jacobs 1996 and Kulick 2000 for full reviews). Overall, this body of research has been relatively ineffective at conclusively identifying the particular sociolinguistic variables that both speakers and listeners may stereotypically associate with gay sexuality. In this article, I attempt to isolate particular linguistic features and then examine them within a certain type of empirical context (Levon 2006) in order to see whether these features can be said reliably to index the sexuality of different speakers in different speech environments.I focus on two prosodic variables, pitch range and sibilant duration,

As a way of comparing qualitative and quantitative approaches to critical discourse analysis (CDA), two analysts independently examined similar datasets of newspaper articles in order to address the research question 'How are different types of men represented in the British press?'. One analyst used a 41.5 million word corpus of articles, while the other focused on a down-sampled set of 51 articles from the same corpus. The two ensuing research reports were then critically compared in order to elicit shared and unique findings and to highlight strengths and weaknesses between the two approaches. This article concludes that an effective form of CDA would be one where different forms of researcher expertise are carried out as separate components of a larger project, then combined as a way of triangulation.

In this paper, I argue for the need to integrate intersectionality theory more fully in language, gender, and sexuality research. I outline the basic principles of what an intersectional approach to identity and identity‐linked speech entails, focusing particularly on the belief that an adequate description of lived experience, and hence social practice, requires us to consider the ways in which multiple systems of social categorization (e.g., gender and sexuality, race/ethnicity, social class, and place) intersect with one another in dynamic and mutually constitutive ways. I review research on the linguistic perception and production of gender and sexuality that has adopted an intersectional perspective to date and argue that while certain aspects of the theory have long had a foothold in work in this area, the field's engagement with the full ramifications of intersectionality as an analytical framework has been partial. I conclude with suggestions about how to anchor a more comprehensive approach to intersectionality in sociolinguistic research.