Acoustic and perceptual characteristics of vowels produced by self-identified gay and heterosexual male speakers

Abstract

Prior research (Tracy & Satariano, 2011) investigated the perceptual characteristics of gay and heterosexual male speech; it was discovered that listeners primarily relied on vowels to identify sexual orientation. Using single-word utterances produced by those same speakers, the current study examined both the acoustic characteristics of vowels, such as pitch, duration, and the size of the vowel space, and how these characteristics relate to the perceived sexual orientation of the speaker. We found a correlation between pitch and perceived sexual identity for vowels produced by heterosexual speakers—higher f0 was associated with perceptual “gayness.” We did not find this correlation for gay speakers. Vowel duration did not reliably distinguish gay and heterosexual speakers, but speakers who produced longer vowels were perceived as gay and speakers who produced shorter vowels were perceived as heterosexual. The size of the vowel space did not reliably differ between gay and heterosexual speakers. However, ...