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

by Erik C. Tracy, Elizabeth D.

Young, Kelly A. Charlton 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).