2003/06/01 by RON SMYTH, Greg Jacobs, Henry Rogers · 6 citations
Computer Science · Mathematics · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Depth sounding #Geography #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Mathematics #Orientation (vector space) #Phonetics and Phonology Research #Psychology #Sexual orientation #Social psychology #Speech and Audio Processing
paper · doi:10.1017/s0047404503323024
openalex publication_date 2003/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/30
This article describes the development of a data bank of 25 male voices spanning the range from very gay-sounding to very straight-sounding, according to listener ratings. These ratings allowed the researchers to examine the effects of different discourse types (scientific, dramatic, and spontaneous) and listener groups (gay males vs. a mix of males and females of unknown sexual orientation) on how listeners perceived the voices. The effects of lexical and pragmatic content were explored by a comparison of spoken and written presentations of the same spontaneous speech samples. The effect of asking participants to rate the voices using different constructs (e.g., masculine/feminine vs. gay-sounding/straight-sounding) is discussed. The ultimate goal of this research program is to examine correlations between these ratings and a range of phonetic variables in order to shed light on the specific features to which listeners attend when judging whether a man's voice sounds gay or straight.