The influence of /s/ quality on ratings of men's sexual orientation: Explicit and implicit measures of the ‘gay lisp’ stereotype

Two experiments examined whether listeners associate frontally normal and misarticulated /s/ with gay-sounding voices, as is suggested by the popular culture stereotype that gay men “lisp”. The first experiment showed that talkers were rated as younger-sounding and gayer-sounding when their speech included tokens with non-canonical variants of /s/ (i.e., a frontally misarticulated token of /s/, a dentalized /s/, or an /s/ produced with an especially high-frequency, compact spectrum). The second experiment showed that listeners recognize voices more quickly when they contain canonical /s/ variants than when they contain non-canonical /s/. Critically, these patterns were robust across different priming conditions in which listeners were presented with either a gay- or a heterosexual-sounding talker prior to the voice-recognition task. Together, these findings confirm experimentally that listeners make the association between non-canonical /s/ variants and male sexual orientation when asked to do so explicitly. However, though gay-sounding voices elicit longer reaction times in a voice-recognition task, we found no evidence that stereotypes about sexual orientation and /s/ production affect implicit processing of talkers' voices.

► We measured listeners ratings of men's perceived sexual orientation using real and synthesized productions /s/-initial words. ► Words containing non-canonical variants of /s/ were rated as gayer-sounding. ► We examined accuracy and latency in a speeded voice recognition task with a subset of the same words. ► Participants took longer to recognize voices when listening to stimuli previously rated to sound gay. ► We conclude /s/ quality affects the view of sexual orientation, these effects are strongest in tasks using conscious ratings.