Gender perception by speech acoustic characteristics and pitch variability

Abstract

The research aimed atphoneticaly examining the speech of 14 men, 7 who declared themselves to be gay and 7 self-declared heterosexuals. The audio of these men´s voices were submitted to tests of perception and judged by lay hearers judges. The theoretical assumptions of Variationist Sociolinguistics (LABOV, 2008 [1972]) and Eckert (1989, 1997, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2012; ECKERT; MCCONNELL-GINET, 2010), and Speech Perception, carried out by Gaudio (1994); Smyth, Jacobs and Rogers (2003); Levon (2007); Campbell-Kibler (2011); among others were used. Significant averages of pitch variability among gay informants were also verified. In most aspects, the averages of homosexual informants were closer to the averages of gay informants participating in English-language surveys than the averages presented by the heterosexual informants. Thus, due to the similarities of results with some surveys, it seems acceptable to affirm that there are some universal typical aspects that characterize a “gay speech”.