The impact of sexual orientation on the pronunciation of stressed vowels in Peninsular Spanish: an acoustic analysis

Abstract

This study explores the possible correlation between sexual orientation and the pronunciation of stressed vowels in Peninsular Spanish through a perception and production tasks. A group of thirty native Spanish speakers (fifteen identified themselves as gay and fifteen as straight) recorded the stimuli that served to elicit the Spanish vowels in stressed position. A group of ten Spanish speakers acted as evaluators and rated the speech samples previously recorded in terms of perceived sexual orientation of the different talkers using a five-point Likert scale. Three main conclusions can be drawn from this study. First, no significant differences were found between straight and gay speakers in terms of the F1 and F2 values for the stressed vowels elicited in our production task. Second, no significant correlation was found between the two acoustic features under study and the judgments of perceived sexual orientation made by our group of evaluators. Third, our group of evaluators identified our speakers’ sexual orientation with a high degree success. Based on our results, we can hypothesize that additional acoustic cues-not analyzed in this study- may play an important role in the understanding and processing of gay speech.