Judgments of self-identified gay and heterosexual male speakers: Which phonemes are most salient in determining sexual orientation?

Abstract

While numerous studies have demonstrated that a male speaker’s sexual orientation can be identified from relatively long passages of speech, few studies have evaluated whether listeners can determine sexual orientation when presented with word-length stimuli. If listeners are able to distinguish between self-identified gay and heterosexual male speakers of American English, it is unclear whether they form their judgments based on a phoneme, such as a vowel or consonant, or multiple phonemes, such as a vowel and a consonant. In this study, we first found that listeners can distinguish between self-identified gay and heterosexual speakers of American English upon hearing word-length stimuli. We extended these results in a separate experiment to demonstrate that listeners primarily rely on vowels, and to some extent consonants, when forming their judgments. Listeners were able to differentiate between the two groups of speakers for each of the vowels and three of the seven consonants presented. In a follow-up experiment we found evidence that listeners’ judgments improved if they were presented with multiple phonemes, such as a vowel and /s/. These results provide important information about how different phonemes can provide discriminant information about a male speaker’s sexual orientation.

Voice Changes Meaning: The Role of Gay- Versus Straight-Sounding Voices in Sentence Interpretation

“…Gay and lesbian individuals are targets of stereotyping and stigmatization, even when their SO is not explicitly disclosed but "detected" by others from minimal cues such as voice (Fasoli et al, 2016). An increasing body of research has shown that listeners categorize speakers' SO according to how they sound (Gaudio, 1994;Linville, 1998;Smyth, Jacobs, & Rogers, 2003;Munson, 2007), even when they speak a foreign language (Sulpizio et al, 2015;Sulpizio, Fasoli, F., Antonio, R., Eyssel, F., Paladino, M. P., & Diehl, 2019), talk for a few seconds (Mack & Munson, 2012), or utter meaningless syllables rather than conveying a meaningful message (Tracy, Bainter, & Satariano, 2015). Sometimes this categorization process happens to be accurate, whereas at other times, it occurs on the basis of stereotypical ideas of how gay men and lesbian women are believed to sound (for an overview see Fasoli et al, 2016;Rule, 2017).…”

Voice and Prejudice: The Social Costs of Auditory Gaydar

“…Also, accuracy rates in auditory gaydar vary greatly across studies, with some studies showing relatively good performance (Gaudio, 1994;Pierrhumber et al, 2004;Rieger et al, 2010;Tracy, Bainter, & Satariano, 2015;Valentova & Havlíček, 2013;) and others showing very low accuracy rates (Munson et al, 2006;Smyth et al, 2003;Sulpizio et al, 2015). The latter studies have often found considerable agreement between judges (even between judges of different languages), but these judgments were often unrelated to the speakers' actual SO.…”

Classifying females’ stressed and neutral voices using acoustic–phonetic analysis of vowels: an exploratory investigation with emergency calls

“…The rejection of frequencies over 4000 Hz affects especially high frequency sounds such as sibilants (Niemi-Laitinen 1999); For example, previous studies have reported that the way of production of /s/ is related to the speaker's gender (Li et al 2016), and even to male speakers' sexual orientation (Tracy et al 2015). Therefore, necessary information for speaker profiling might be lacking from the call recordings due to limited transmitted frequencies.…”