From: amz@cis.ohio-state.edu (arnold m zwicky)
Subject: research on the gay male voice
Followup-To: soc.motss
Summary: gaudio abstract
Originator: amz@iguana.cis.ohio-state.edu
Organization: out in linguistics
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1992 14:26:21 GMT

i quote below from an abstract for a paper presented at NWAVE 20
(the 20th conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation) at
georgetown university, 3-6 october 1991.  the author is rudolf
(rudi) gaudio, a linguistics graduate student at stanford
(and a friend of mine); rudi is gaudio@csli.stanford.edu, but
he is probably not reading mail now, since he is going off for
a year of dissertation research in nigeria.  the paper reports
on research done for a ph.d. "qualifying paper" (a sort of
mini-m.a. thesis) at stanford.  none of this has been published.

stuff is square brackets is mine.

----------------------

Sounding Gay: Pitch Properties in the Speech of Gay and Straight Men
  Rudolf Gaudio, Stanford University

   What does it mean to say a man sounds gay?  Notwithstanding a few
passing, unsupported references (Lakoff 1975, 1990; McConnell-Ginet
1983) to the "fact" that gay men use `effeminate' or `women's' speech
forms, linguists have virtually ignored the existence of gay, lesbian
and bisexual speakers and speech communities altogether.  [it really
is quite astounding.  the huge literature on speech style and social
evaluation, much of it inspired by howard giles, treats all kinds of
stuff - geographical and class dialects, age, personality variables,
*body type* even - and focuses very heavily on male/female and
"masculine"/"feminine" differences, but without even a mention of
sexual orientation.  same for the many (otherwise excellent) survey
volumes on "language and the sexes" or "language and gender".]
(Moonwomon 1985, which considers lesbian speech, is an exception.)  [i
have to point out here that both rudi and birch moonwomon did their
research as graduate students (birch at berkeley) and went on to
dissertation topics on non-lesbigay-related topics.  what is striking
is that such work has not been undertaken by established researchers;
the topics seem to me to be natural ones for any experimentalist
interested in the psychology and sociology of gender roles as
expressed through speech, not merely to researchers who happen to be
lesbigay (only a couple of whom are experimentalists).]  This
pper examines the literature on gender and language with reference
to gay men, and criticizes it for failing to consider critically
the role of sexual orientation in gender identity and gender-based
differences in speech.

  Perhaps the most common stereotype of gay men's speech, found in
everyday conversation as well as in linguistic articles, is that gay me
sound like women.  And one of the most frequently cited characteristics
of women's speech that gay and/or `effeminate' men are supposed to
share is intonational variability (Lakoff 1990:204; McConnell-Ginet
1983:75; Crystal 1975:85).  Gay men, like women, are said to make use
of a greater overall pitch range than straight men, and to have more
dynamic intonation contours, i.e. steeper and more frequent changes
in pitch.  This paper begins to answer the question of what constitutes
`gay'-sounding speech and will use this information to initiate a
broader discussion of how gay men use speech to represent themselves
socially.

  In this study, four openly gay men and four straight men were
recorded reading aloud two written passages; one of the passages was
from an accounting text, while the other was short monologue from a
gay play.  [you see the problems that come from the limited resources
a graduate student has to do unfunded research: small numbers,
reliance on reading aloud rather than unmonitored natural speech in
reasonably natural contexts.]  Each subject was also interviewed about
his high school and college experience, and about his own notions of
gay identity and behavior.  A sample tape of two sets of speech sample
was made, with each set featuring eight subjects reading aloud the
same 15-second portion of one of the passages.  The tape was played to
a group of thirteen listeners who rated each other of the samples on
four polar adjective scales: gay/straight, masculine/effeminate,
emotional/reserved, and affected/ordinary.

  Listeners demonstrated general agreement on their ratings of the
speech samples, and their evaluation of speakers as `gay' or
`straight' correlated significantly with speakers' actual identities.
Moreover, speakers judged `gay' were also consistently judged
`effeminate', and `straight'-sounding speakers were judged `masculine'.
Preliminary phonetic analysis of the sixteen speech samples revealed
no significant difference (p<.05) in overall pitch range between
gay and straight men.  Suggestive differences (p<.10) between the
two groups were found for the accounting text speech samples, but
not for the theatrical monologue set.

  These findings suggest that...contrary to sociolinguistic
stereotypes, overall pitch range is not a factor affecting listeners'
judgments as `gay/straight' or `masculine/effeminate'...Further
analysis will determine whether more specific pitch properties such 
as the frequency or extent of upward and downward pitch fluctuations,
correlate with stereotyped judgments of men's speech...[in the
actual presentation, some further analysis was presented, but it
was as inconclusive or conflicting as these first findings.]

  Straight and gay subjects' own language attitudes reflect a belief
that stereotypically `gay/effeminate' speech does not *really*
resemble women's speech.  Henton (1989) suggests that social
stereotypes have unduly influenced linguists' accounts of male-female
differences in soeech; similarl, linguistic treatments of gay speech
must not take stereotypical attitudes to be empirically valid
reflections of gay men's speech patterns...

  ...sociolinguists who are interested in gender differences in
speech should not fail to take speakers' sexual orientation into
account.

[i gave a paper at this conference, on variation in the assignment of
names of plants to the grammatical categories COUNT and MASS in
english.  but then i'm a theoretical linguist, not an
experimentalist.]