Duration of Onset Consonants in Gay Male Stereotyped Speech

Abstract

Gaudio (1994) found that listeners are largely accurate in identifying the sexual orientation of male speakers from recordings of a read passage not marked for gay content.In search of the phonetic cues which listeners use in this identification, Gaudio studied F0 differences between gay and straight male speakers.Gaudio subjected the recorded speech to multiple kinds of F0 analysis (mean F0, median F0, etc., as well as several different measures of pitch dynamism), and concluded that range and variability of F0 do not appear to correlate with sexual orientation, at least by any of the measures used.If listeners can identify the sexual orientation of speakers with reasonable reliability, then what are the salient phonetic cues, if not range and variability of F0?One possibility is that F0 plays an important role in sexual orientation identification, but does so in a way which has not yet been identified.Another possibility is that some or all of the salient cues are unrelated to F0.Without ruling out the former possibility, the present study 1 takes a preliminary look at some variables not related to F0.I will argue that the performance of a gay male stereotyped voice involves the systematic lengthening of certain consonants.My general methodology differs from Gaudio's in one major regard.Gaudio recorded gay and straight men speaking in their ordinary voices, and then compared the two groups.By contrast, the speakers in the present study (who included both gay and straight men) were asked to read the same passage twice, once in an "ordinary" voice, and again in a "queeny" voice.One must be extremely cautious in making inferences about natural speech on the basis of a consciously performed stereotype: there is no guarantee that the cues used by listeners to identify gay male speakers are the same cues which speakers employ to deliberately produce an exaggerated gay male stereotype.In spite of this shortcoming, there were two reasons for my choosing this methodology over one involving the comparison of the ordinary read speech of gay and straight male speakers.First, the question of how speakers perform a gay male stereotype is an interesting one in its own right; and when our knowledge reaches a state where it is possible to do so, it will be of interest to compare the cues used in stereotype production against 1 This paper has benefited from comments from a long list of individuals.Special note should be given to Gene Buckley, Rolf Noyer, Mark Liberman, William Labov, and two anonymous reviewers.Any errors in this work are of course my own.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 81 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.