The Acoustic Characteristics Of Gays/Lesbians And Heterosexual And Their Influence On Their Sexual Orientat Ional Perception

Sexual orientation is the preference towards another person, which is male orfemale, in mental or behavior. It can be divided to heterosexuality, homosexuality,bisexuality and asexuality. Recently, sexual orientation had became a hot topic of theresearchers, besides, the linguists and psychologists focused on the “gay speech” andthe perception of “gay speech”. However, almost all of the studies on acoustics wereheld in English speaking countries. There were few studies held in Chinese speakingcountry. This research aims at exploring the acoustical character differences betweenhomosexual and heterosexual people, and if it was possible to identify peoples’ sexualorientation with the acoustical character. The author recruited16participants to recordtheir voice as stimulus, which include4homosexual males,4homosexual females,4heterosexual males and4heterosexual females, then analysis the acoustical characterof these materials(the average time duration of/s/,/i/,/e/,/a/and//and the averagefrequency of/i/,/e/,/a/and//). The study then recruited14homosexual people and20heterosexual people to judge the peoples’ sexual orientation of the4records pickedout from the original records. The results of the study are as follows:I. both in the prose passages and popular science passages, males and femalesshow sexual orientation difference on the acoustic characters.II. the accuracy in judging sexual orientation shows difference betweenhomosexual males and heterosexual males, while there is no differences betweenfemales.III. the subjects can correctly perceive the sexual orientation of others in the bothspeech materials.Ⅳ. the acoustical character cannot predict the sexual orientational perception ofpeople...