When you answer the phone and start talking to a stranger, can you tell what the person’s sexual orientation is?
A new study from Ohio State University psychologists reports that the average person can, more often than not, tell the difference between gay and straight male speakers. The secret, they report, is in the vowels. Seven gay men and seven straight men were asked to record monosyllabic words for the researchers. The recordings were then played back for subjects of the study, who responded with whether they thought the speaker was gay or straight after hearing the first letter sound of the word, the first two letter sounds, and the entire word.
It wasn’t until the first two-letter sounds, which generally included a vowel, that the subjects’ guessing accuracy soared. The listeners chose the correct orientation 75 percent of the time.
Erik C. Tracy of Ohio State, lead author of the study, said:
I’m not sure what exactly the listeners are responding to in the vowel. 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. … We believe that listeners are using the acoustic information contained in vowels to make this sexual orientation decision.
It’s an interesting study, although not entirely new, as Tracy stated. A 2004 study out of Northwestern University dove into the same topic, including lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual women in addition to men. They found similar results. According to the study’s abstract, released by the Acoustical Society of America:
Differences in the acoustic characteristics of vowels were found as a function of sexual orientation. Lesbian and bisexual women produced less fronted /u/ and /a/ than heterosexual women. Gay men produced a more expanded vowel space than heterosexual men.
The 2004 study is more insightful because it aims to make the important distinction that the lesbian women didn’t show the same speech patterns as straight men and that the gay men didn’t show the same speech patterns as straight women. This works toward a more open, inclusive picture of sexuality that looks at societal gender pressures, whereas the new study risks reinforcing misconceptions that gay men are inherently feminine. The 2004 report said:
These results are inconsistent with the conjecture that innate biological factors have a broadly feminizing influence on the speech of gay men and a broadly masculinizing influence on the speech of lesbian/bisexual women. They are consistent with the idea that innate biological factors influence GLB speech patterns indirectly by causing selective adoption of certain speech patterns characteristic of the opposite sex.
So, what do you make of it? Is there any merit to the “gayccent” theory? And do you, like me, fear that this study may simply serve as slightly offensive fodder for stereotyping and setting up a blanket rule for what is and isn’t gay?
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I think it is plausible considering that many people report being able to detect a person’s race based on patterns of speech. It would be more reliable with a larger study group, especially since regional dialects could effect the results.
I don’t doubt that a search for similarities in speech among persons who self-identify as members of the same group — in this case, gay men and lesbian women — will yield results. I suspect that this is likely to be true regardless of the nature of both the self-identification and the group.
These studies seem to assume that sexual orientation — which we should distinguish from sexuality — can be explained in strictly biological and most likely genetic terms, reducing it more or less to the phenotypic expression of a “gay gene” or “lesbian gene.” More importantly, they studies assume that one does not choose one’s sexual orientation. Both of these assumptions are in part true. The first assumption is true insofar as it is impossible for an organism to do anything that its genes do not provide the potential for it to do. The second assumption is true insofar as it is impossible for one to choose one’s object of desire; by its very nature, an object of desire is in itself desirable. However, these studies make a meta-assumption about these two assumptions–namely, that in themselves they account for the true nature of sexual orientation.
What these studies miss, therefore, is what these assumptions miss. The weakness of the strictly genetic/biological explanation is that it fails to account for how what is potential genetically becomes actualized in behavior. It is worth noting that the studies essentially take for granted that a “gay gene” or “lesbian gene” will be found — it has not as of yet — as if there is a direct connection between genes and behavior that will keep intact the standard categories we use to make sense of sexual orientation, categories that, significantly, are not scientific in origin but rather juridical, social, political–and condemnatory. This first assumption supports the second — that one does not choose one’s sexual orientation — but again the problem of actualization comes up, and in this case it undermines the assumption that one does not choose one’s sexual orientation. As I said above, undoubtedly there is a sense in which one’s sexual orientation is given, a brute fact outside of one’s control. However, becoming a sexually active individual — and therefore an actual rather than merely potential gay man, for instance — undoubtedly implies some aspect of agency. One goes where one will meet potential partners, one does what is necessary to attract certain partners, etc. Although these social practices are of necessity made potential by genetics and biology, it would be an error, I think, to assume that these practices are simply “natural.” In other words, I want to suggest that self-identified members of a group are not necessarily fully reconciled with the identities they take on as members of that group.
Identities — in this case, identities related to sexual orientation; it applies in other cases as well — are always performed, and they are performed according to rules that no single individual devises. From this it follows that the social practices involved in the constitution of identities are to some extent autonomous of the individuals whose identities they make possible.
Given all this, any description of someone who “has” a certain identity will be incomplete if it fails to provide an account of how such an identity is taken up, that is, how the individual relates to the social practices involved in constituting, or actualizing, his identity. These studies fail to do this and so are incomplete. They regard as unproblematic the process involved in self-identification, believing the problem to have been eliminated with the use of a flawed genetic-deterministic conception of sexual orientation. The similarities in speech the studies found are not insignificant, but the question of where we should locate the causes of these similarities is open. Homosexuality? Perhaps. But homosexuality is not a strictly genetic-biological matter. If there are such things as “gay accents,” then we should be looking for how they have emerged in tandem with the social practices involved in the constitution, or actualization, of gay identities. This would lead us to look at the formation of gay culture(s), which cannot be understood properly without looking in turn at the geographic, political, and economic contexts in which the formation of such culture(s) takes place. What is being investigated is accents, that is, language; and language, of all things, is social–any analysis of any aspect of it requires a holistic approach. The limited scope of these studies means that at most they demonstrate the somewhat obvious fact that similar people have similarities. But they do so within a paradigm that maintains a genetic-determinist understanding of sexual orientation that misses the social entirely, which is not unexpected when it comes to the topic of identity but is somewhat incredible when it comes to the topic of language.
Pseudo-science, anyone?
This was a fascinating reply, and speaks to the multi-determinant model of sexual and gender identity that is becoming more prevalent in the field of Social Work. Understanding that identity is multifaceted rather than pre determined helps disrupt the binary choices that most cultures provide. I imagine some who read the above feel threatened by removing the absolutism of determinism. I on the other hand am heartened by the opportunities for exploration that a society who embraced a multi-determinant model and less binary forms could provide for the people within.
And do you, like me, fear that this study may simply serve as slightly offensive fodder for stereotyping and setting up a blanket rule for what is and isn’t gay?
That or someone is trying to come up with some science to back up the concept of gaydar/bidar.
Well, I know gay men who exhibit the speech patterns listed above, and gay men who don’t. However, I haven’t really detected any different between lesbian speech patterns and hetero women speech patterns.
People pick up speech patterns from their social group. This is ongoing throughout life, and happens pretty fast whenever we change environments. Think of going to college, moving out of state, or how accents change by generation in this country as people dis- identlfy with their parents, and identify with peers. Being socialized to gay subculture includes adopting it’s speech patterns.
This study is a load of “Hot Brown Stuff” , Accents, Speech patterns and voice determined by the shape of the Larynx , Gender and Weight , Sexual orientation has nothing to do with how one sounds.
The researcher/s has mixed up real accent and sounds with what some gay men and women do to show their sexuality to in public , by mimicking the sound patterns of other gender , Witch by the way was encouraged by the media.
This “Study” is nothing more than another way to push the gay stereotypes , And it will lead to more hate and prejudice than the already exist ….
Is this really what passes for research in the social sciences? This is a horrible study! Bad methods! There simply aren’t enough people making the records to accurately reflect a random sample of the gay and straight populations. If the question is, does sexuality affect speech pattern, you need a large random sample of those that are actually providing the speech sample.
First of all, a 10:1 ration would be much more reflective of the population (or whatever the current ration is believed to be), probably 100:10 for actual numbers, and they would need to be chosen completely randomly. The selection process would NEED to be written only so that researchers weren’t influenced by their own preconceptions when they hear the voices of those wanting to participate.
All recordings should go into a bank and listeners would hear a set number of random selections from that bank to guess the sexuality. There would have to be enough listeners to make sure that all recordings in the bank get a sufficient number of guesses so that patterns can be established.
Talk about a study built to fit a pre-conceived outcome and stereotype. And I won’t even get into gender… :-/
“Gay men produced a more expanded vowel space than heterosexual men.” oh hhaaaayyyyyy guuuurl.
Hmmm. Nathan Lane and Johnny Weir sound nothing like Mel Gibson OR Carrie Underwood. Jodi Foster or Rosie O’Donnell sound like like Mel Gibson or Carrie Underwood. In my experience I think Nathan/Johnny and Jodi/Rosie represent the speech pattern of homosexual men and women quite well. Nathan is colorful and free- flowing. and certainly elongates his vowels. Jodi is more serious and staccato- almost swallowing her words after she speaks them. But then there’s Portia DeRossi and Gareth Thomas (whodda thunk?) I think there is something to this.I think different English dialects/accents should be studied as well as EACH major language across the globe to come up with something more scientific. I think as gays assimilate to mainstream culture over time there won’t be a need to consciously or subconsciously identify with gay culture any longer and the speech pattern lines will become even more blurred..as they should be.
It’s either true or it isn’t. If it is, should we pretend it isn’t?
A control for in-group socialization would be to run this for kids of, say, thirteen–prior to their finding a bigger group of those like them whose speech patterns they imitate. Then wait a decade to see…..
How are you supposed to pronounce “gayccent”? That’s a terrible blended word.