Sociophonetics, Gender, and Sexuality

Podesva, Robert J.; Kajino, Sakiko

doi:10.1002/9781118584248.ch5

Cited by 11 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…Finally, I note that listeners’ associations between linguistic and socio-indexical variables do not always seem to be based on objective informativity of those variables. Rather, some variants can become disproportionately salient or enregistered (Eckert, 2012; Foulkes & Hay, 2015; Jaeger & Weatherholtz, 2016; Levon, 2014; Podesva, 2007; Podesva, Roberts, & Campbell-Kibler, 2001). These deviations between objective informativity and subjective salience remain to be explained and specified in more detail, as well as what connection—if any—there is between listeners explicit social perceptions and their ability to adapt to socially-indexed linguistic variation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Structure in talker variability: How much is there and how much can it help?

Kleinschmidt

2018

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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One of the persistent puzzles in understanding human speech perception is how listeners cope with talker variability. One thing that might help listeners is structure in talker variability: rather than varying randomly, talkers of the same gender, dialect, age, etc. tend to produce language in similar ways. Listeners are sensitive to this covariation between linguistic variation and socio-indexical variables. In this paper I present new techniques based on ideal observer models to quantify (1) the amount and type of structure in talker variation (informativity of a grouping variable), and (2) how useful such structure can be for robust speech recognition in the face of talker variability (the utility of a grouping variable). I demonstrate these techniques in two phonetic domains—word-initial stop voicing and vowel identity—and show that these domains have different amounts and types of talker variability, consistent with previous, impressionistic findings. An R package (phondisttools) accompanies this paper, and the source and data are available from osf.io/zv6e3.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Structure in talker variability: How much is there and how much can it help?

Kleinschmidt

2018

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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“…Most importantly, the vocal expression of SO is necessarily constrained by the parameters of any given language (e.g., type and number of vowels and flexibility of their use), suggesting that (a) the expression of SO may be easier to emerge in some languages than in others and (b) that different acoustic cues may be used in different languages to express (and interpret) SO. In line with this idea Zimman [ 14 ] has suggested that even differences in dialects among English speakers may produce distinct perceptions of voices as gay-sounding (see also, [ 18 , 19 ]). By extension, one may suspect that languages, even more so than dialects, may influence how listeners categorize speakers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Hence, being exposed to languages that possess a higher frequency of “gay-related” acoustic cues should increase the likelihood, and possibly the accuracy, of distinguishing between gay and heterosexual speakers. Moreover, the construal of gender and SO varies greatly across cultures [ 19 ], as does the stigma associated with gay membership, which in turn is likely to affect those gender-related speech patterns that are under speaker’s control. The investigation of different languages therefore becomes essential to understand whether voice based categorization of SO is a language-dependent process, being proper for the English language (and the North-American context) only, or whether it is generalizable across languages.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Sound of Voice: Voice-Based Categorization of Speakers’ Sexual Orientation within and across Languages

et al. 2015

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Empirical research had initially shown that English listeners are able to identify the speakers' sexual orientation based on voice cues alone. However, the accuracy of this voice-based categorization, as well as its generalizability to other languages (language-dependency) and to non-native speakers (language-specificity), has been questioned recently. Consequently, we address these open issues in 5 experiments: First, we tested whether Italian and German listeners are able to correctly identify sexual orientation of same-language male speakers. Then, participants of both nationalities listened to voice samples and rated the sexual orientation of both Italian and German male speakers. We found that listeners were unable to identify the speakers' sexual orientation correctly. However, speakers were consistently categorized as either heterosexual or gay on the basis of how they sounded. Moreover, a similar pattern of results emerged when listeners judged the sexual orientation of speakers of their own and of the foreign language. Overall, this research suggests that voice-based categorization of sexual orientation reflects the listeners' expectations of how gay voices sound rather than being an accurate detector of the speakers' actual sexual identity. Results are discussed with regard to accuracy, acoustic features of voices, language dependency and language specificity.

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“…Where possible, we distinguish between "sex" when discussing research that relies on a simplistic classification of speakers into males and females, and "gender" when describing research that takes at least some account of relevant social and cultural factors. Gender, unlike sex, abstracts over a range of globally and locally constructed speaker-listener practices (Eckert and Labov 2017) and is claimed to be as impactful to the constructions of identity as the dimensions of region and age (Podesva and Kajino 2014). In one of the foundational studies to examine variations with speaker sex in production, Fischer (1958) found that girls consistently used more of the perceived standard form of the (ING) variable [ɪŋ] than boys, a pattern that was later discussed by W. Labov (2001) as a preference for women to use more standard variants than men.…”

Section: Life-stage Gender and Yeah-nomentioning

confidence: 99%

When Positioning Mediates Social Judgements: Life-Stage, Gender, and Yeah-No in Australian English

Sherwood,

Mailhammer,

Antoniou

2024

Languages

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This study explores the correlation between social categories and linguistic variables, focusing on the perception of the discourse marker yeah-no in Australian English. Research suggests that these correlations reflect individuals’ recruitment of variables for the purpose of communicating social meaning. However, not all social categories which correlate with a variable in production are recognizable as social meaning. This study investigated how individuals’ positioning to a variable mediates their awareness to its social meaning by examining perceptions of gender and life-stage in yeah-no users and non-users. We found that individuals judged sentences including yeah-no as more likely to be said by a student, and this effect was stronger for individuals who did not self-report as yeah-no users. Furthermore, while there was no significant effect of gender, participants who did not self-report as yeah-no users were more likely to judge yeah-no sentences as said by a male speaker rather than a female speaker. The findings imply that the perception of social meaning is influenced by an individual’s positioning towards a variable. More broadly, the results provide support for using self-report techniques in the investigation of social meaning.

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Sociophonetics, Gender, and Sexuality

Cited by 11 publications

References 53 publications

Structure in talker variability: How much is there and how much can it help?

Structure in talker variability: How much is there and how much can it help?

The Sound of Voice: Voice-Based Categorization of Speakers’ Sexual Orientation within and across Languages

When Positioning Mediates Social Judgements: Life-Stage, Gender, and Yeah-No in Australian English

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