Judgments of American English male talkers who are perceived to sound gay or straight: Which personal attributes are associated with each group of talkers?

Abstract

Upon hearing a spoken utterance, listeners associate certain attributes (e.g., emotional) with self-identified gay male talkers and other attributes (e.g., reserved) with self-identified straight male talkers. In the current study, we explored whether listeners associated additional personal attributes with these types of talkers, and whether different contexts (e.g., listeners being informed of the talker’s sexual orientation) affected how strongly listeners associated personal attributes with talkers. Twenty-four talkers (twelve who self-identified as gay and twelve who self-identified as straight) from an established corpus were examined. Notably, previous work found that these talkers’ self-described sexual orientation (SO) did not always align with listener-perceived SO (i.e., a self-identified gay talker was perceived as straight sounding, and vice versa). Listeners evaluated these talkers for eight attributes (e.g., boring, confident, intelligent, mad, old, outgoing, sad, and stuck-up) in three contexts: talkers’ SO not referenced, talkers’ SO truthfully referenced (i.e., listeners were informed that a straight talker was straight), and talkers’ SO falsely referenced (i.e., listeners were informed that a straight talker was gay). Results suggested that self-identified gay and straight talkers whom listeners perceived as sounding gay were perceived as confident, mad, stuck-up, and outgoing; self-identified gay and straight talkers whom listeners perceived as sounding straight were perceived as sad and old. Furthermore, listeners’ judgments did not differ when the talkers’ SO was truthfully referenced, falsely referenced, or not referenced for all attributes except sad and stuck-up. The results indicate that perceived SO generally has the greatest effect on listeners’ perception of a talker’s attributes and, for most attributes examined, this is the case regardless of whether the listeners are informed (truthfully or falsely) of the talkers’ self-identified SO.