While performing my daily Unicorn Booty read through, I discovered this gem. The article, "Can Gays Be Outed By Their Vowels?" (also found at topnews.in) briefly summarizes and examines a recent study involving 7 gay and 7 straight men. The straight men had never seen or heard these gay men, but their challenge was to listen to words with heavy vowel sounds to see if they could guess the sexuality of the speaker. The result? Seventy-five percent of the straight men's guesses were correct.
I found it interesting that there was even a study about something like this. By the way, this study began and was conducted at OHIO STATE by Eric Tracy, one of OSU's cognitive psychologists. This further interested me because one of my best friends is a gay man in OSU's graduate social linguistics department. He, too, found this to be both interesting and silly. We both felt that studying these supposed speech patterns created a picture of gays as the "other". Why do the gays have to be the other, aside from the apparent fact that heterosexuality is the norm? Maybe the hetero men say their vowels differently, making them the "other"! Anyway, it also furthers stereotypes that gay men are effeminate. This, as mentioned before, is problematic since it is not representative of all gay men, and it makes straight and effeminate men appear to be gay.
So what do you guys think? Did this piece get you to pay more attention to the way things are pronounced? Is there really a general difference between the speech patterns of heterosexuals and homosexuals? What about lesbians? Does a lesbian's speech out her? And if there is a difference, what does that mean for bisexuals' speech? Does it mean we like to label things no matter how stupid the criteria is?
I know there is no study as of yet that studies how lesbian's speak but lesbians are often characterized as butch in most mainstream media. Actually I take that back according to the portrayal in mainstream media most lesbians are basically men with vaginas with a few being lipstick. There is no nuance we all are one or the "other". Same goes for gay men the gay men that are featured on TV are effeminate. Sorry to go on a tangent but I hate studies that back up what mainstream or "the norm" is already saying.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you. It is a skewed study with a sample size not large enough. The objective of the study is also not very scientific, but quite biased on the grounds that it is suggesting that gender roles (being effeminate) will have some effect on the way men pronounce things.
ReplyDeleteBut this is not the first study that I've seen attempt to find some kind of biological difference between straight and gay men. I've seen studies looking at whether the shape of eyebrows factor in, the size of the forehead, etc. It is ridiculous. Researchers need to find something more useful to do instead of trying to come up with methods that will allow us to tell who is gay or not. This is pure pseudo-science.
I will give them credit for trying to be imaginative in some sense though. Ridiculously imaginative. I have a friend who has what people would characterize as a "effeminate voice" but he is the straightest man I know. Phonetics of language, in my opinion, is not influenced too much by sexual orientation, as it is by culture and upbringing.
ReplyDeleteBesides the small sample size, and the worries about whether they chose participants randomly or just picked gay men with effeminate voices, there's another problem with this experiment: They only recorded openly gay men. This would defeat the purpose of using vocal patterns to find out whether someone is in the closet, because they haven't included any closeted gay men in their test group (which, admittedly, would be hard to do, since guys who are in the closet generally don't advertise that fact).
ReplyDeleteEven if it were true that openly gay men pronounce vowels differently than straight men, this experiment doesn't provide any evidence about gay men who are hiding their sexual orientation, which is the whole point of the "gaydar" stuff. Maybe when men are trying to hide their sexual orientations, they pronounce words differently to project a more heterosexual voice (if there is such a thing). That would make this experimental result useless in improving one's gaydar.
And I know it's already been mentioned, but seriously, seven people? Come on, that's not even close to enough.
A friend of mine posted this on Facebook, and I think there is some misunderstanding.
ReplyDeleteThe link you first provide is a classic example of inaccurate science reporting. There is no “outing” of any kind going on. The talkers were not instructed to conceal their sexuality, and the study does not say that gay men are incapable of concealing their sexuality. Instead, the researchers were following up on a well-established result, anchored in a few previous studies, that variation in sexuality is reflected in pronunciation. This is NOT claiming that there is a biological link between sexuality and pronunciation. Instead, it’s well-known that indexical factors such as race, economic class, and geographic origin influence pronunciation. This line of research is just showing that sexuality is another kind of indexical factor that matters for pronunciation.
This is also NOT claiming that all gay men speak the same. The studies that have been conducted (as far as I know) have not investigated individual variation, but that does not mean the researchers really believe that all talkers are exactly the same. Individual variation studies require much larger data sets and much more advanced statistics, and research into influences of sexuality on pronunciation is very young. Researchers are still laying the foundation.
Amusingly, the result from this study is largely a replication of a result from 2006 [1] that listeners can reliably discriminate gay talkers from heterosexual talkers after hearing only one single-syllable word. The actual new information from this study is that, for certain speech sounds, listeners can also do this after hearing only one speech sound. This really is not entirely new either, as the 2006 paper looks at sexual variation as reflected in pronunciation of speech sounds like the one associated with the letter “s.”
On a technical point. You seem to be referring to the fourteen talkers as the sample size. While they are, in a sense, a sample, “sample size” in this case refers to the people making judgements about the talkers’ productions. This kind of study usually has 30 - 60 participants, and a fairly large difference of 75% (where chance is 50%) is almost certainly statistically significant with this number of participants.
I also want to address your concern “that there was even a study about something like this.” The real problem in Science as a social activity is focusing on the ruling class and ignoring everyone else. Researchers should be careful when undertaking research outside of Western straight white college students, but pretending that gay men don’t exist is not helpful. The title of the presentation (http://asa.aip.org/web2/asa/abstracts/search.may11/asa257.html) is “Differentiating between gay and heterosexual male speech,” presenting gay and heterosexual as just two values of an indexical variable. The researchers are not presenting heterosexual speech as normal or gay speech as deviant. Previous research [2] has explicitly argued against the idea that gay men are just trying to sound more feminine.
Finally, I agree that research in this area is incomplete. This study says little about bisexual speech, and it is far too underpowered to look at individual variation. These shortcomings, however, argue for MORE studies in this area, not less. Benjamin Munson (http://www.tc.umn.edu/~munso005/) has done a lot of great work in this area if you want to look into it more. I’ll close with a link to the following blog post, which I think is relevant: http://restructure.wordpress.com/2008/03/30/science-is-not-the-oppressor/
[1] Munson, B., Jefferson, S.V., & McDonald, E.C. (2006). The influence of perceived sexual orientation on fricative identification. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 119, 2427-2437.
[2] Munson, B., & Babel, M. (2007). Loose lips and silver tongues: projecting sexual orientation through speech. Linguistics and Language Compass 1, 416-449. Available online at: http://www.tc.umn.edu/~munso005/Munson&Babel_LLC_final_aspublished.pdf