This guide accompanies the following article: Benjamin Munson and Molly Babel, ‘Loose Lips and Silver Tongues, or, Projecting Sexual Orientation through Speech’, Language and Linguistics Compass 4/2 (2010): DOI:10.1111/j.1749-818x.2009.00028.x

Author’s Introduction

Although language and the male–female gender dichotomy have been topics revisited throughout the course of modern linguistics, the issue of sexual orientation and speech has entered the discourse much more recently. This comes at a time when stereotypes about the relationship between sexual orientation and speech patterns are plentiful in popular culture, and when theories of phonetic and phonological representations that retain some speaker-specific (and subsequently social) detail are gaining acceptance within the discipline. Before briefly reviewing work on the traditional male–female gender dichotomy and introducing the growing body of research on how sexual orientation interacts with speech, this study provides a short background on speech production. This background is crucial, as it introduces the subtle ways in which both physiological and social factors can influence speech production. In the heart of the article, we present the result of both speech production and perception research as they pertain to ways in which a talker’s sexual orientation is projected in speech. The research demonstrates that sexual orientation is cued acoustically in both vowels and consonants, and that listeners are sensitive to the meaning of the variation. A critical contribution of this line of research is that, contrary to popular stereotypes, the phonetic characteristics of GLB (gay, lesbian, or bisexual) speech is not an across-the-board accommodation or approximation toward the phonetic patterns of the opposite sex norms. Rather, GLB speech variants are learned patterns that are culturally specific, exhibiting the same patterns of variation of any speech style. We also address the topic of how phonetic features associated with a GLB identity may be acquired. Although this article is authored by two laboratory phonologists, it is of relevance to those with other primary fields of interest, including sociolinguists, psycholinguists, and language acquisition researchers, as well as those in gender studies and anthropology.

Suggested Readings

As the investigation of GLB speech patterns from a speech science perspective is still quite new, gathering a list of suggested readings that use laboratory methodologies and quantitative phonetic methods in their investigation of GLB speech communities is a challenge. Below we have suggested several readings that target particular aspects of the enterprise.

Docherty, G., and P. Foulkes. 2000. Speaker, speech, and knowledge of sounds. Phonological knowledge: conceptual and empirical issues, ed. by Noel Burton-Roberts, P. Carr and Docherty Gerry, 105–29. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

This chapter by Docherty and Foulkes is a review of sociophonetic research and laboratory phonology work. These lines of research are converging, suggesting that phonology as a whole cannot be studied without considering how social and talker-specific information is encoded and accessed in language use. The relevance of this chapter to speech production, perception, and processing is not to be missed.

Johnson, Keith. 2006. Resonance in an exemplar-based lexicon: the emergence of social identity and phonology. Journal of Phonetics 43.485–99.

This article deals only with the difference between the speech patterns of men and women. However, in presenting vowel data from several languages, Johnson demonstrates the learned and culturally specific nature of gendered speech styles. Also presented in the article are the results of an experiment demonstrating how stereotypes affect speech processing.

Munson, Benjamin, Elizabeth C. McDonald, Nancy L. DeBoe, and Aubrey R. White. 2006. The acoustic and perceptual bases of judgments of women and men’s sexual orientation from read speech. Journal of Phonetics 34.202–40.

This article reports on the results from three experiments that investigate the acoustic characteristics of GLB speech (Experiment 1), listeners’ abilities to accurately judge sexual orientation (Experiment 2), and how judgments of sexual orientation relate to judgments of other social traits (Experiment 3). The breadth of Munson et al.’s article is noteworthy, as it examines both production and perception of both gay men and lesbian women’s speech patterns.

Podesva, Robert. 2006. Intonational variation and social meaning: categorical and phonetic aspects. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 12.189–202.

This article chronicles the use of a phonetic marker of three gay men across speech styles and conversational partners. In this study, Podesva examines the use of rising pitch in declarative utterance. The finding is that the extent to which rising pitch in declarative utterances varies according to the context. Specifically, the use of rising intonation was more frequent during interactions with gay peers, as opposed to more professional settings.

Queen, Robin. 2007. Sociolinguistic horizons: language and sexuality. Language and Linguistic Compass 1(4).314–30.

Queen’s article is akin to our own in that it addresses gender issues in linguistics, although Queen’s does so from a much stronger sociolinguistic and identity-oriented framework. Her article is a broader treatment of the issues of language and sexuality, including the work not only on GLB communities, but on the act of performing sexuality in general. The article also delves deep into the social theory surrounding this topic within sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology.

Online Resource

Resources for Language and Gender Studies page:http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/bucholtz/lng/

The Resources for Language and Gender Studies page is a web resource managed by Professor Mary Bucholtz at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It provides links and information to a wide variety of gender-related research from linguistics to ethnic studies to psychology, although its focus is slanted more toward more qualitative disciplines.

Focus and Discussion Questions

1. Why can't acoustic differences among talkers be studied solely by looking at anatomical and physiological variations among people?

2. How does a talker’s anatomy contribute to their vocal characteristics?

3. Why should the topic of sexual orientation and speech be of interest to non-sociolinguists? Who should care? Why?

4. What evidence is there that different speech styles can't be explained solely by differences in cognitive or linguistic abilities?

5. Is it better to construe concepts like sexual orientation and speech or gender and speech as binary categories or as continua? Why? How might the use of categorical labels like gay and straight in experiments affect listeners' behaviors?

6. Numerous studies of sexual orientation and speech have used detailed acoustic analyses instead of, or in addition to, phonetic transcription. Why do you suppose this is so? What additional information can be gained from acoustic analyses, above and beyond the information that can be gained from transcription analyses.

Instructional Activities

1. There are speech stereotypes for all types of social groups. Report, discuss, and debate as to whether any of these stereotypes hold any weight. If so, what phonetic patterns ground these stereotypes? If not, where might these stereotypes stem from?

2. Design and build your own production, perception, or processing experiment to examine issues regarding sexual orientation and speech.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2009.00186.x