Acoustic contributions to perception of female sexual orientation and gender performance
Open AccessAcoustic contributions to perception of female sexual orientation and gender performancePurpose: The current study investigates whether the perception of female sexual orientation is based in perception of gender performance, acoustic cues, and/or personal characteristics. Societal mindset towards the gay, lesbian, and bisexual community has changed rapidly in recent years, providing sociolinguistics and phoneticians a unique opportunity to observe the formation of a speech style as well as better understand the corresponding stereotypes. Methods: The speech of a primary female speaker and four female foil speakers were acoustically altered to create six experimental stimuli conditions based on previously researched acoustic correlates of lesbian speech (i.e., F0, F1, F2). Listeners then rated the speaker’s gender performance and sexual orientation among other scales. Results: Altering F0 and F1/F2 (in individual vowels and across the sentence) in isolation and in combination had no effect on the perception of sexual orientation. Alterations did affect the perception of gender performance, with F0 being the most influential variable. Gender performance and sexual orientation were not found to be correlated. Conclusion: Sexual orientation and gender performance are distinct constructs; this suggests that an LB speech style is not simply based on male norms as would be implied by the gender inversion theory, but rather is a more unique stylistic choice. Listeners’ did not change their perceptions of the speaker’s sexual orientation even as their perceptions of gender performance morphed, implying that women are able to perform their gender in both masculine and feminine ways, at least to some degree, without the perception of their sexual orientation changing.
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