Peter Marshall: Whose motto is "Do Your Best"?
Paul Lynde: I guess we can rule out Jimmy Carter...
Posted on 05/21/2011 8:01:50 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
FRIDAY, May 20 (HealthDay News) -- For the average listener, the vowel sounds in an unfamiliar voice quickly give away the speaker's sexual orientation, a new study finds.
"I'm not sure what exactly the listeners are responding to in the vowel," study lead author Erik C. Tracy, a cognitive psychologist at Ohio State University, said in a news release from the American Institute of Physics. "Other researchers have done various acoustic analyses to understand why gay and heterosexual men produce vowels differently. Whatever this difference is, it seems that listeners are using it to make this sexual orientation decision."
When hearing an unfamiliar voice at the other end of the phone line, most people instantly judge the stranger's characteristics based on how they speak, and the new study suggests listeners are usually pretty accurate in their determination.
"This is a phenomenon that occurs every day," Tracy said. "We are constantly speaking with people we don't know on our phones, and just from this conversation, we might be able to identify personal characteristics about that person, such as their gender, age, race or sexual orientation."
In order to understand how this process works, Tracy and a colleague focused on one characteristic -- sexual orientation. They asked seven gay and seven heterosexual males to record single-syllable words (including "mass," "food" and "sell") and then played the recordings for listeners. The study participants were then asked to identify the sexual orientation of the speakers when hearing only the first letter sound of those words, the first two letter sounds, or the entire words.
The listeners were unable to determine the sexual orientation after hearing the sound of the first letter in the spoken word, for example, just the "m" sound in the word "mass." But, "when presented with the first two letter sounds [for example "ma"], listeners were 75 percent accurate," Tracy said. "We believe that listeners are using the acoustic information contained in vowels to make this sexual orientation decision," he explained.
The findings are scheduled to be presented May 23 in Seattle at the meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Experts note that research presented at meetings has not been subjected to the same type of rigorous scrutiny given to research published in peer-reviewed medical journals.
More information
The Nemours Foundation has more about sexual orientation.
Copyright © 2011 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
In my (admittedly and thankfully limited) experience, gay males tend to end up affecting psuedo-southern accents, which is simultaneously insulting to Southerners and a good identifier.
This explains the effeminate homosexual that the hyper masculine nazi homosexuals persucuted but what about the butch homo’s? How does this work with the leather bar homo’s?
Maybe its because the Twinks like to have their lips pursed into a tight “O” shape, whilst they’re trying to talk to their “man”!
yep..he’s a flamer
Anybody check out Obamas vowel sounds?”
Yeth, I think that is how he thounds.
Peter Marshall: Whose motto is "Do Your Best"?
Paul Lynde: I guess we can rule out Jimmy Carter...
Several differences have been identified.
Hair whorl direction, index-finger/ring-finger length ratio, etc. Here are some...
The gay guys pick up that ‘vowel’ accent from watching too much Bravo TV - or maybe it’s a ‘bowel’ accent (sorry for the visual - in advance)
Is that a fudgecicle puppet, lol?
That reminds me of a Saturday Night Live skit where some frat boys get a wish and they ask to see a couple lesbians get it on and they forget to say "hot" so they get very, very butch lesbians.
Did taxpayer money pay for this research?
Fabulous!!
To me Obama sounds like he has a midwestern accent, which I am very used to. Not a lot of twang or slang. Fairly straight pronounciation.
A: It’s a tv show. Duh. :)
OK, that’s one more stereotype down the drain, thank God.
Sounds very similar to phrenology.
“The gay guys pick up that ‘vowel’ accent from watching too much Bravo TV - or maybe it’s a ‘bowel’ accent (sorry for the visual - in advance)”
It might have something to do with TV. For example, I briefly glanced at “Glee” while channel surfing and didn’t think about sex for days.
I watch most TV shows on the internet- there’s been so much buzz on that show ‘Glee’ I was thinking of watching a couple of episodes - then I thought better of it and decided to steer queer of the show completely....
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