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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 435

Part of Session 171: Experimental methods in the study of social meaning (Other abstracts in this session)

‘Feminine’ sibilants: the attestation of gay stereotypes in Hungarian

Authors: Racz, Peter (1); Schepacz, Andras (2)
Submitted by: Racz, Peter (Uni Freiburg, Germany)

A growing amount of research supports the existence of gay speech stereotypes in English (cf. e.g. Munson & Babel 2007), the notable ones being high rising intonation, increased F0, and sibilant stridency. These features are suspected to exist in other languages as well (Kristiansen et al., 2011). This paper discusses the results of a matched-guise test focussing on sibilant stridency in Hungarian. The main findings are that sibilant stridency – which here entails an increased centroid frequency of voiceless sibilants – is also subject to Hungarian listener attitudes, and that it can serve as a gay speech stereotype in itself. The matched-guise test (Giles et al., 1973) had two guises, read by a native speaker linguist, a ‘normal’ one and a second one with increased sibilant stridency but otherwise identical to the first one, as well as six fillers. The test had 17 participants (aged 20-30, 6 heterosexual females, 6 heterosexual males, 5 homosexual males) who had to rate the guises (and fillers) on a Likert scale according to eight characteristics (selfish-generous, promiscuous-faithful, masculine-feminine, unfriendly-friendly, messy-orderly, mean-nice, insensitive-caring, fakegenuine). These characteristics were based largely on a similar study on English English by Levon (2006). The results were normalised for score values and analysed using a linear mixed model with subject as a random effect. 

The results show that subjects on the whole found the guise with the strident sibilants more feminine (t=2.410, p<0.05). This is, however, mainly due to the female subjects, who show this correlation even stronger (t=5.572, p<0.001), while it is not significant with the gay males at all. The only significant correlation present in the gay males’ results holds between strident sibilants and sounding prude (t=3.026, p<0.05).

While the size of the subject sample does not warrant far-reaching conclusions, the results already show that sibilant stridency is a faithful gay stereotype in itself, which is all the more interesting as this result comes from a language completely unrelated to English, the locus of research on this subject. This, in turn, hints at a universal perceptional bias present in speaker attitudes towards sibilant stridency. 

References

Giles, H., D. Taylor & R. Bourhis (1973). Towards a theory of interpersonal accommodation through language: Some Canadian data. Language in society 2:02, pp. 177–192.

Kristiansen, T., M. Maegaard, J. Møller & N. Pharao (2011). Exploring the social meanings of Copenhagen Danish /s/. Talk given at 6th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe in Freiburg.

Levon, E. (2006). Hearing gay: Prosody, interpretation, and the affective judgments of men’s speech. American Speech 81:1, pp. 56–78.

Munson, B. & M. Babel (2007). Loose lips and silver tongues, or, projecting sexual orientation through speech. Language and Linguistics Compass 1:5, pp. 416–449.