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Male voices and perceived sexual orientation: An experimental and theoretical approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2003

RON SMYTH ,
GREG JACOBS  and
HENRY ROGERS
RON SMYTH
Affiliation:
Departments of Linguistics and Psychology, University of Toronto, 130 St. George St., Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H1, Canada, [email protected]
GREG JACOBS
Affiliation:
Departments of Linguistics and Psychology, University of Toronto, 130 St. George St., Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H1, Canada, [email protected]
HENRY ROGERS
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto, [email protected]
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Abstract

This article describes the development of a data bank of 25 male voices spanning the range from very gay-sounding to very straight-sounding, according to listener ratings. These ratings allowed the researchers to examine the effects of different discourse types (scientific, dramatic, and spontaneous) and listener groups (gay males vs. a mix of males and females of unknown sexual orientation) on how listeners perceived the voices. The effects of lexical and pragmatic content were explored by a comparison of spoken and written presentations of the same spontaneous speech samples. The effect of asking participants to rate the voices using different constructs (e.g., masculine/feminine vs. gay-sounding/straight-sounding) is discussed. The ultimate goal of this research program is to examine correlations between these ratings and a range of phonetic variables in order to shed light on the specific features to which listeners attend when judging whether a man's voice sounds gay or straight.

Keywords

Gay menhomosexualityphoneticssexual orientationvoice
Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , June 2003 , pp. 329 - 350
Copyright
© 2003 Cambridge University Press

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