Hearing 'gay': Prosody, interpretation and the affective judgment of men's speech

This article describes a controlled experiment designed to determine what people listen to specifically when judging a speaker’s sexuality. Four experimental stimuli were produced by digitally shortening the syllable duration and narrowing the pitch of one male speaker reading a passage. Listeners rated various combinations of the four stimuli on 10 affective scales, including straight/gay and effeminate/masculine. Altering the two variables was insufficient to alter listeners’ perceptions of the speaker’s sexuality to a level of significance. However, significant correlations between the different attitudinal scales illustrated that perceptions of sexuality are ideologically linked to other perceptions of personality and personhood.