Longer words or shorter words: Which one is more effective in distinguishing between self-identified gay and heterosexual male speakers?

Abstract

Prior research demonstrated that listeners relied primarily on vowels to determine a male speaker’s sexual orientation (Tracy and Satariano, 2011). Additionally, listeners became more confident in their sexual orientation judgments if the utterance included more vowels (Tracy, 2013). Since multisyllabic utterances also contain more consonants, are listeners’ judgments based on the number of vowels or consonants in an utterance? To investigate this question, monosyllabic, bisyllabic, and trisyllabic words were selected. Within each group of words, the number of phones varied. For example, a trisyllabic word contained either seven phones (“division”) or nine phones (“contribute”). Listeners became more confident of the speaker’s sexual orientation if the word included more vowels. With respect to the monosyllabic and bisyllabic items, listeners were less confident if the number of consonants in the word increased. Ratings were more confident for “have” compared to “help”. The results for the trisyllabic words differed. Listeners became more confident if the word contained more consonants. “Contribute” resulted in more confident ratings than “division”. The results demonstrated that listeners were more confident in the speaker’s sexual orientation if the word included more vowels, but under certain conditions, confidence ratings did not improve if the utterance included additional consonants.