Hearing “gay”:
prosody, interpretation, andtHeaffectivejudgmentsofmen’sspeecH
Abstract
This article describes a controlled experiment designed to determine what people listen to specifically when judging a speaker’s sexuality. four ex-perimental 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 ten affective scales, including straight/gay and effeminate/ masculine. Altering the two variables was insuffi-cient to alter listeners’ perceptions of the speaker’s sexuality to a level of signifi-cance. However, significant correlations between the different attitudinal scales illustrated that perceptions of sexuality are ideologically linked to other percep-tions of personality and personhood.
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