GENDER PERCEPTION BY ACOUSTIC SPEECH CHARACTERISTICS AND PITCH VARIABILITY

ABSTRACT

The research aimed at phoneticaly examining the speech of 14 men, 7 who declared themselves to be gay and 7 self-declared heterosexuals. The audios of these men´s voices were submitted to tests of perception and judged by evaluating listening lay judges. The theoretical assumptions of Variationist Sociolinguistics by 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 greater 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 found in some surveys, it seems acceptable to affirm that there are some universal typical aspects that characterize a “gay speech”.

sociolinguistics; linguistic variation; linguistic perception; phonology; gay speech