Along the same vein of recognizing the race of a speaker through their speech, I am interested in researching a listener’s ability to determine a speaker’s sexual orientation through speech. More specifically, is male homosexual speech patterns detectable enough that children may hold implicit bias against a “gay” voice before they have even formed a category for sexuality? To determine this, we have to look that the implications of what “gay” speech is and how homosexuality in based in today’s society.
First, what is “gay” speech? In comparison to research discovering the features of AAVE, there actually has not been much research regarding linguistic features and their connection to particular sexualities. The little research that exist more often addresses specifically only male homosexuality, with a lack of literature on female sexuality, which is why I will be focussing solely on bias against the former group. With homosexual men here is a certain sound that has been confirmed by a study called the “gay lisp”. This misarticulated /s/ sound has been shown to be strongly associated with male homosexuality, which may be caused by the prevalence of this sound in popular media (Mack 2012). Another study has shown that listener’s were better able to judge male sexual orientation when the /s/ sound was combined with certain vowel sounds (Tracy 2015), showing it’s interconnected nature with other factors in male homosexual speech. Lastly I want to note that the “gay lisp” does not refer to all gay men, yet will still be effective in testing implicit bias. Another aspect of speech that I would like to address is femininity in male homosexual speech related to this “gay lisp”. Two studies show how femininity is associated: Munson (2007) found that adult homosexual men speech was perceived as more feminine than their heterosexual counterparts, and Munson (2015) found that children ages 4-13 with “gay lisp” were judged as sounding more girl-like. Both of these studies show how femininity and the “gay lisp” are markers of sexual deviance in young boys, and that this linguistic marker is evident to children and should be researched further. Although there these two features are clearly associated with male homosexuality, my research will include other general features along with these two characteristics so that my experiment is most accurate to implicit bias against this voice. That said, further research should be done to understand the full scope of gay linguistic features.
Regarding the categorization of sexuality, research area is particularly sparse, and so researching bias and categorization of sexuality will also depend on past research that connects sexuality with gender socialization of men. There are many studies that connect masculinity with the rejection of femininity and gay speech. For example, Cameron (1997) found that gender identity can influence young men to avoid sounding gay and feminine to adhere to strict masculinity rules expected by society. This can also be seen with Fasoli et al (2018) that found that heterosexual men viewed their speech as typical of their gender, as a opposed to homosexual men who viewed theirs as atypical. In addition, heterosexual men were most likely to communicate their sexuality through their speech, showing that there was a desire to affirm their masculinity and typical gender identity. These examples show that there is a correlation between gender and sexuality, where feminized speech is seen as not masculine or typical of male speech, and is thus avoided and stigmatized in male speech. This gender socialization with masculinity and heterosexuality is an interesting concept, and can help reduce when this categorization occurs. There is little research on the categorization of sexuality in children, however there is research on an important concept that has been identified is the connection gender and sexuality in the “Heterosexual market”, as coined by Penelope Eckert. This concept refers to the idea that gender segregation begins in preadolescence, where kids being to form gender ideals and participate in heterosexual activities. Due to the prevalent association with heterosexuality and privilege, this is an important stage because this “market” in which children become straight commodities is not for romantic purposes but acquiring status through heterosexual pairings. This is important because it shows the stage in life where children begin to acknowledge heterosexuality as the norm. This stage could possibly be when “gay” speech is consciously categorized, and possibly when young boys begin can explicitly understand bias against homosexuality. Therefore it is likely that an age group 3-6 would not have made a category for sexual identity yet. However since the concept of gender is learned much earlier than that, these children may still hold an implicit bias related to the femininity of the gay male voice. Due to this one could argue that these results would thus show children’s implicit bias against male femininity and not sexual orientation, yet I would argue that these two concepts are interconnected, where male homosexuality is feared because is related to deviating from stereotypical male gender roles.
There is very little research regarding children’s bias against male homosexuality before their categorization of sexuality. However it is extremely important that research is done regarding this, especially when language is used as a stimuli. Like in research of AAVE, language can help children socially evaluate the speaker, and it is equally possible that through lack of personal experience or through media that children will socially evaluate a voice that is in general negatively represented. Hopefully with this study there will be more information on if bias is formed before categorization, and will direct further research on gay linguistic features, linguistic bias against gay voices, and when specifically categorization of sexuality begins to form.
Works Cited:
Cameron, Deborah (1997). Performing gender identity: Young men’s talk and the construction of heterosexual masculinity. Language and masculinity.Language and Masculinity, 47–64. Oxford: Blackwell.
Eckert, Penelope (2010). Language and power in the heterosexual market.Stanford University.
Erik Tracy et al (2015). Judgments of self-identifies gay and heterosexual male speakers: Which phonemes are most salient in determining sexual orientation?. Journal of Phonetics, Volume 52.
Fabio Fasoli et al (2018). Who wants to sound straight? Sexual majority and minority stereotypes, beliefs and desires about auditory gaydar. Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 130.
Mack, Sara and Benjamin Munson (2012). The influence of /s/ quality on ratings of men’s sexual orientation: Explicit and implicit measures of the “gay lisp” stereotype. Journal of Phonetics, Volume 40, Issue 1.
Munson, Benjamin (2007). The acoustic correlates of perceived masculinity, perceived femininity, and perceived sexual orientation. Sage Journals.
Munson, Benjamin (2015). Variation in /s/ and the perceived gender typicality of children’s speech. University of Minnesota.