What is a gay voice

However, the correlation between vocal tract length and body size is relatively stable in women as compared to men, whose body sizes do not systematically correlate with the sizes of their vocal tracts; further, gender differences in voice resonance are statistically disproportionate to the average difference in vocal tract shape and length between men and women Listen Lab, Many gendered patterns of speech and vocal production are acquired in childhood — well before puberty spurs physiological differences in the vocal tract—sometimes as young as three or four years old Zimman, Coates,p.

Gender inversion theory, which has Freudian origins, is intertwined with long-standing stereotypes of queerness, in which queer members of one sex will exhibit behaviours more similar to that of heterosexual members of the opposite sex Kachel et al.

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Two science YouTubers have scoured studies behind the theory that homosexual. After identifying phonetic characteristics that seem to make a man’s voice sound gay, their best hunch is that some gay men may subconsciously adopt certain female speech patterns.

But as we. The "gay voice" is usually a result of men adapting their speech patterns to be more socially compatible with women. After three years of research, linguistics professors Henry Rogers and Ron Smyth may be on the verge of answering that question.

Gender can be defined as the behavioural, psychological, social, and cultural traits typically associated with one biological sex group Merriam-Webster, Gender nonconformity, then, is an outward expression of gender that defies the typical norms associated with the gender one identifies with Merriam-Webster, ; White, Queer communities may be disproportionately gender nonconforming Kachel et al.

Fundamental questions must be asked to remain aware of potential biases in researching queer populations. As Woodall explains, voice linguists believe that gay voice is a product of “nurture rather than nature.” For instance, since queer boys might tend to spend more time with girls and women as children, they might pick up on certain speech habits and patterns.

Gay male speech has been the focus of numerous modern stereotypes, as well as sociolinguistic studies, particularly within North American English. What are we trying to predict? High pitched, extended vowels and incredibly articulated: so-called 'gay voice' is a real phenomenon, researchers say.

The gay voice phenomenon, explainedBut there are some interesting linguistic theories surrounding the gay voice phenomenon. Scientific research has uncovered phonetically significant features produced by many gay men and demonstrated that listeners accurately guess speakers' sexual orientation at rates greater than chance.

However, for the purposes of this paper, non-linguistic aspects of the theory are largely irrelevant. Importantly, gender inversion theory is not relegated to the domain of speech and speech perception. This question is surprisingly difficult to answer and poses many problems when researching the gay voice and auditory gaydar.

Some gay men have feminine tendencies and therefore socialize with women more than men. Sedivy describes the tendency for listeners to make split-second assumptions about speakers based on auditory features such as accents and dialects.

Whom do we include in our sample? It's a stereotype because only some gay men have the "gay voice". Although gender inversion theory fails to account for the robust psycholinguistic factors at play, the theory persists, and the idea that sexual orientation can be detected phonetically remains a compelling one across cultures.

It is common knowledge that men have lower voices than women, statistically. This is due to physiological differences spurred by estrogen- versus testosterone-dominant puberties, in which the latter spurs a lengthening of the vocal tract Listen Lab, Although some arguments have been made as to correlations between overall body size see Rendall et al.

Where does sexual orientation fit into the picture? However, they did observe significant differences in formant frequencies of certain vowels. With a broad overview of what literature, it becomes evident that there are very few consistencies in the results across studies, save for the fact that differences are often but not always there and may be studied.

[1] Historically, gay male speech. Stereotypes that inform the listener as to the identity of the speaker can be critical in terms of actually processing auditory linguistic input, as some acoustic features of speech may be closely tied to the identity of a given speaker; these cues can vary wildly between identity categories, gender included Sedivy, By analyzing the linguistic features often associated with queer identity, we can better understand attitudes and perceptions of queerness.

An article by Rendall et al. Why do some gay men “sound” gay? While accents are usually associated with region or socioeconomic class, the same process can be applied to the various ways queer people might speak differently than their non-queer majority counterparts.

There is very little reason to believe that the gay voice would differ from gender in terms of being constructed as an element of sexual orientation identity, rather than an inflexible trait as suggested by Rendall et al. We also know that gender is phonetically indexed in differing ways depending on the gay, culture, and individual Zimman, and may overlap with other social identity categories such as class Gratton, and, of course, sexual orientation.