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.
I think a lot of what they do is talk with clenched teeth which produces something that’s almost like a lisp but not quite. Not uncommon for women to do this as well. For a common reference point listen to Mary Matalin. She does this. Course it doesn’t sound gay when a woman does it LOL.
Why do they talk that way? It’s a tribal thing. There are tons of sub-cultures that talk a certain way and gay is only one among many IMHO. Try -
- Airplane pilots (they’ve all got that Chuck Yeager thing going on).
- Football announcers (Keith Jackson?)
- Anyone having anything to do with Nascar.
- Radio Announcers - different sounds depending on the format. For NPR btw see above - the males all sound gay to me.
- Blacks
- etc. etc. etc.
I think you're right. There's definitely something to that.
Tammy Bruce and Portia Di Rossi, for examples.
Dude, the references are real.
(Though I actually had meant to post this URL: http://nymag.com/news/features/33520/index1.html)
ROTFLOL!
You are so funny!
It’s so good to see you. ;o)
Jodie Foster for another.
Thank you. I had some stiff competition...
Ha! Stiff competition...lol!
You’re funny. ;o)
More junk science.
Does this mean pubic schools are also going to have to teach gaybonics now?
Manner of speech, as with clothing choices, are based upon social conditioning.
There are regional dialects (or “gay clique” dialects even) that are not at all genetic.
The more listeners emulate the speakers around them, the more they will “sound the same”.
You could do the same “study” in gangbangers and find that the slack tones in their manner of speech are different from someone working on Wall Street too “biyotch”. “idn’t tha so? are’ight?”
And I thought it was the conthonanths.
Good points. I had a boss who worked with a man for years before the man “came out” as “gay” and left his wife and family. My boss said there was a distinct progression of speech changes when the guy converted.... or should I say, perverted.
-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)-
____________________________________________________________
Zorro:The Gay Blade
Vowels
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd3qkKpb0VI
They don’t already?
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