Percepção da orientação sexual de homens gays e heterossexuais por meio de características acústicas da fala

• Main Author: Barbuio , Eduardo
• Publication Date: 2016
• Format: Doctoral thesis
• Language: por
• Source: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UFPB
• Download full: https://repositorio.ufpb.br/jspui/handle/tede/9212
• topic: Variação Linguística; Percepção Linguística; Fala Gay; Linguistic Variation; Linguistic Perception; Gay Speech; LINGUISTICA, LETRAS E ARTES::LINGUISTICA

The main objective of this study was to evaluate the existence of phonetic characteristics of speech read by male speakers that can be used to identify them as having a "gay" or a heterosexual orientation. Thus, two groups were constituted, bringing together 14 informants from the city of Recife-PE. In the first group, 7 individuals, who declared themselves gays, were investigated; In the second, the other 7, self-declared heterosexuals. In order to better understand the phonetic characteristics, the audio recording of the voice of these men was subjected to tests of perception and later judged by hearers lay judges. As a specific objective, it was sought to investigate which acoustic clues, such as phrasal aspects and vowel and consonant sounds, could contribute to the fact that the listener's lay judges, non-specialists belonging to the area of Linguistics or corresponding, could attribute values to the sexual orientation of the 14 informants. The lay judges were allocated into three groups: a group of 25 gay men; A group of 25 heterosexual men; And a group consisting exclusively of 25 women whose sexual orientation was unknown. Another objective was to verify the efficiency of each of these three different groups of evaluating judges to identify the sexual orientation of the 14 informants, subdivided into the two groups. As theoretical basis for the thesis, the theoretical assumptions of Variationist Sociolinguistics (LABOV, 1972, 1974, 1982, 1994) and Eckert (1989, 1997, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2010, 2012) were used and, for the analysis of the perception were used Gaudio (1994); Smyth, Jacobs and Rogers (2003); Levon (2007); Campbell-Kibler (2011); Lopes (2012) and Tracy, Bainter and Santariano (2015). In the research, significant differences in the duration of the seven tonic oral vowels /a/, /Ɛ/, /e/, /i/, /Ɔ/, /o/, /u/ produced by gay informants were found, especially in the mid near front /e/ and / Ɛ/ and in the central open low /a/. Differences, were also found in the fricative /s/ when in the final coda position, the productions of the group of gay men were longer than that of heterosexuals group. About the formants, the mean of F1 and F2 production of gay men were considerably higher than those of heterosexuals in all vowels, especially about the values of /i/, /Ɛ/, /e/ and /a/. Therefore, among the gay speakers, there was wider opening of the mandible and anterioration of the tongue in the production of the vowels. Significantly greater averages of pitch variability among gay informants were also verified. In most aspects, the averages of homosexual informants, whose were part of the research, were closer to the averages of gay informants participating in English-language surveys than the averages presented by the heterosexual informants. Thus, due to the similarities found in the results of some surveys, obtained among English and Portuguese speaking gay men, it seems plausible to affirm that there are some universal typical aspects that characterize a so-called "gay speech".