Abstract:

Munson [J. Phonetics (2006)] found that 11 self‐identified gay and 11 heterosexual men produced different variants of the vowel ∕æ∕, with gay men producing lower, more retracted variants and heterosexual men producing higher, more tense variants. Listeners’ performance in a perception task in which they rated these talkers’ sexual orientation was correlated with these measures: talkers with higher, more‐tense ∕æ∕ were rated as sounding more heterosexual than talkers with lower, more retracted ∕æ∕. However, Smith [New Ways of Analyzing Variation (2008)] found the opposite pattern in an experiment in which listeners rated the sexual orientation of productions by 10 trained talkers of sentences containing either tense or retracted ∕æ∕ variants. A different group of listeners showed the same pattern when rating the ∕æ∕ words excised from these sentences, though these listeners replicated Munson ’s original finding when presented with the ∕æ∕ words from the original 22 talkers. An attempt to reconcile these findings is made through detailed acoustic analysis of the ∕æ∕ productions in the two experiments. Results underscore the importance of doing careful acoustic analyses in concert with careful phonetic transcription when conducting experiments on perception of social variables and speaker attributes.