title: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Pembroke, PO Box 1510, Pembroke, NC 28372, USA.
authors.forename: Erik C
authors.initials: EC
authors.lastname: Tracy
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 235 East Cameron Avenue, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.
authors.forename: Sierra A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Bainter
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, 1835 Neil Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
authors.forename: Nicholas P
authors.initials: NP
authors.lastname: Satariano
keywords: Gay and heterosexual male speech; Indexical characteristics; Sexual orientation; Sociophonetics; Vowels and consonants