Contents:
GAY VOICE: STABLE MARKER OF SEXUAL ORIENTATN OR FLEXIBLE COMMUNITN DEVICE?
This phenomenon is generally referred to as “gaydar” and fed as the abily to distguish another person’s sexual orientatn g direct cu (Valentova, Rieger, Havlicek, Lsenmeier, & Bailey, 2011). Wh this bate, Vasilovsky (2018) cricized gaydar rearch for nceptualizg sexual orientatn cu mostly as “static” and “nate” rather than as “dynamic” munitn addrs this cricism, we foc here on a cue that may have some relatively stable featur, but that is also known to be open to modulatn, namely voice. We will exame whether voice is a fixed enty and whether gay and straight speakers modulate their voic strategilly or spontaneoly le wh their munitive tent and wh the social ntext, so as to eher emphasize or mimize their sexual orientatn.
When judged on the basis of voice alone, gay speakers are generally perceived as (relatively) ls heterosexual than straight speakers, but they still tend to be systematilly misclassified as heterosexual, suggtg that heterosexualy is the flt rponse (Smyth et al., 2003; Sulpiz et al., 2015, 2020; see Lick & Johnson, 2016, for this straight tegorizatn bias) lerature has also examed the actual atic cu that distguish gay and straight speech styl. Compared to straight men, gay men have recently been found to show higher pch modulatn some voice sampl (Suire, Togti, Durand, Raymond, & Barkat-Deadas, 2020). Regardls of their sexual orientatn, speakers wh ontal lispg tend to be rated lower on masculy (Mowrer, Wahl, & Doolan, 1978) and are more likely to be perceived as gay (Van Borsel & Van Putte, 2014).
Pch is associated wh explic gay speech stereotyp (Kachel et al., 2018a), but often is not predictive of the perceived sexual orientatn of specific speakers (Gd, 1994; Smyth et al., 2003). Overall, the lerature nfirms that some voice characteristics are stereotypilly associated wh homosexualy and/or femy/masculy (see Kachel, Simpson, & Steffens, 2017; Kachel et al., 2018b) and that listeners are not only fluenced by actual atic differenc but also rely on stereotypil cu when formg an imprsn of the speaker (Munson, Crocker, Pierrehumbert, Owen-Anrson, & Zucker, 2015) few exceptns, rearch on dory gaydar has nceptualized gay and straight voice as a relatively stable characteristic of the speaker and, hence, has foced on habual ways of speakg.