The acoustic and perceptual bases of judgments of women and men's sexual orientation from read speech

Munson, Benjamin; McDonald, Elizabeth C.; DeBoe, Nancy; White, Aubrey R.

doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2005.05.003

Cited by 182 publications

(219 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Some homosexual men spoke with relatively high voice pitch but so too did some heterosexual men. Subsequent studies have similarly failed to find robust differences in mean voice pitch between homosexual men and women and their heterosexual counterparts, although some have reported differences in longer-term pitch modulation patterns and other elements of prosody (Gaudio, 1994;Munson, McDonald, DeBoe, & White, 2006;Rogers, Jacobs, & Smyth, 2001;Smyth, Jacobs, & Rogers, 2003;Waksler, 2001). Hence, although some homosexual men and women may speak with a relatively high or low voice pitch, respectively, or with more exaggerated or attenuated pitch modulation in ways reminiscent of the opposite-sex, these most basic dimensions of the stereotypes of homosexual men and women appear not to be entirely reliable.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Queen’s English: An Alternative, Biosocial Hypothesis for the Distinctive Features of “Gay Speech”

2007

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Popular stereotypes concerning the speech of homosexuals typically attribute speech patterns characteristic of the opposite-sex, i.e., broadly feminized speech in gay men and broadly masculinized speech in lesbian women. A small body of recent empirical research has begun to address the subject more systematically and to consider specific mechanistic hypotheses to account for the potentially distinctive features of homosexual speech. Results do not yet fully endorse the stereotypes but they do not entirely discount them either; nor do they cleanly favor any single mechanistic hypothesis. To contribute to this growing body of research, we report acoustic analyses of 2,875 vowel sounds from a balanced set of 125 speakers representing heterosexual and homosexual individuals of each sex from southern Alberta, Canada. Analyses focused on voice pitch and formant frequencies which together determine the principle perceptual features of vowels. There was no significant difference in mean voice pitch between heterosexual and homosexual men or between heterosexual and homosexual women, but there were significant differences in the formant frequencies of vowels produced by both homosexual groups compared to their heterosexual counterparts. Formant frequency differences were specific to only certain vowel sounds and some could be attributed to basic differences in body size between heterosexual and homosexual speakers. The remaining formant frequency differences were not obviously due to differences in vocal tract anatomy between heterosexual and homosexual speakers, nor did they reflect global feminization or masculinization of vowel production patterns in homosexual men and women, respectively. The vowel-specific differences observed could reflect social modeling processes in which only certain speech patterns of the opposite-sex, or of same-sex homosexuals, are selectively adopted. However, we introduce an alternative biosocial hypothesis, specifically that the distinctive, vowel-specific features of homosexual speakers relative to heterosexual speakers arise incidentally as a product of broader psychobehavioral differences between the two groups that are, in turn, continuous with and flow from the physiological processes that affect sexual orientation to begin with.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Queen’s English: An Alternative, Biosocial Hypothesis for the Distinctive Features of “Gay Speech”

2007

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“…This conjecture is immediately challenged by another fi nding in Munson et al (2006). Here, Munson et al showed that /ae/ variation also predicts listeners' ratings of speech clarity and perceived height.…”

Section: The Socioindexical Signifi émentioning

confidence: 91%

“…Mack further showed that listeners fell into distinct groups based on the acoustic parameters that were associated with their judgments of perceived sexual orientation. Mack's study was very much in the mold of other studies on the perception of talker characteristics, such as Munson et al (2006) and Smyth et al (2003). Critiques of that endeavor were made earlier in this paper and will not be replicated here.…”

Section: Mackmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…Many of these studies also show that listeners group talkers into these categories when presented with speech that has particular variants used by people of particular genders, ages, social classes, etc. One such study is Munson et al (2006), which found differences between self-identifi ed gay and heterosexual men in their production of the vowel /ae/, among other sounds. Listeners' ratings of how gay-sounding a man's voice was were signifi cantly correlated with the acoustic characteristics in /ae/.…”

Section: The Socioindexical Signifi émentioning

confidence: 99%

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Levels of Phonological Abstraction and Knowledge of Socially Motivated Speech-Sound Variation: A Review, a Proposal, and a Commentary on the Papers by Clopper, Pierrehumbert, and Tamati, Drager, Foulkes, Mack, and Smith, Hall, and Munson

Munson¹

2010

Laboratory Phonology

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“…Given that working-class and middle-class adolescent girls are more similar to one another physiologically than to adult men, one must turn to articulatory practices to explain these findings. On the other side of the Atlantic, several studies have identified /s/ as one of the most consistent and most salient cues for the perception of sexual orientation among North American English-speaking men (Campbell-Kibler 2011;Levon 2007;Munson 2007;Munson et al 2006;Zimman 2013; inter alia), which demonstrates that adult men are capable of producing /s/ with a range of frequency profiles. This usually comes in the form of a more negative skew, i.e.…”

Section: Review Of the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Variability in /s/ among transgender speakers: Evidence for a socially grounded account of gender and sibilants

Zimman

2017

Linguistics

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Sibilant consonants are well-established as resources for the negotiation of gender and sexuality, but the origin of these links is less clearly agreed upon. Some researchers have pointed to sex differentiation in the vocal anatomy as a potential cause for gender differences in /s/, though a review of the literature indicates that learned articulatory patterns play a critical role. This article focuses on the spectral qualities of /s/ among 15 English-speaking transgender men and transmasculine individuals. Because their early socialization and physiological development is not normatively aligned with their self-defined gender identities, trans people are well-positioned to illuminate the relative contribution of physiology and identity to the gendered voice. Two analyses are presented, one of which focuses on inter-speaker variation among all 15 participants, and the other of which compares one bilingual speaker's productions of /s/ in English and Spanish. Together, these analyses demonstrate that sex category does not determine the gender-linked acoustic characteristics of /s/. Instead, a more complex, multidimensional framework for gender that distinguishes between gender assignment, role, identity, and presentation is necessary to account for the full range of gendered phonetic styles that speakers can employ and hence to understand the process through which gendered voices arise.

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The acoustic and perceptual bases of judgments of women and men's sexual orientation from read speech

Cited by 182 publications

References 37 publications

The Queen’s English: An Alternative, Biosocial Hypothesis for the Distinctive Features of “Gay Speech”

The Queen’s English: An Alternative, Biosocial Hypothesis for the Distinctive Features of “Gay Speech”

Levels of Phonological Abstraction and Knowledge of Socially Motivated Speech-Sound Variation: A Review, a Proposal, and a Commentary on the Papers by Clopper, Pierrehumbert, and Tamati, Drager, Foulkes, Mack, and Smith, Hall, and Munson

Variability in /s/ among transgender speakers: Evidence for a socially grounded account of gender and sibilants

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