Social Indexation of with Brazilian Speakers of Rio de Janeiro

Dany Thomaz Gonçalves - UFRJ

Academic Advisors: Drª Christina Abreu Gomes / Dr. João Moraes - UFRJ

The current brazilian sociocultural context reflects a rigorous moment of discussions and
demands for sexual freedom and the pursuit of homosexual rights. In order to contribute to linguistic
discoveries, this research attempts to answer some hypotheses related to the production and perception
of resources and/or acoustic clues found in the speech of homosexual men from Rio de Janeiro. The
intention is, after finishing the corpus recording, to verify similar contexts to those already found in
English language studies (GAUDIO, 1994; LINVILLE, 1998; ROGERS, HENRY & SMYTH, RON,
2003; PIERREHUMBERT ET AL., 2004; PODESVA, 2008, TRACY, BAINTER E SANTARIANO,
2015). In general, our purposes are to answer questions about the indexation of sexuality through
acoustic characteristics found in the speech of gay men from Rio de Janeiro; analyze, through production
data, whether there is a relationship between the duration of coronal fricative in coda position and gay
gender identity and verify through perceptual tests which characteristics (duration of oral vowels;
duration of / s / in coda and pitch) are specific to gay speech, and to what extent the sexuality of the
hearing judge has an effect on recognizing the speaker's gender identity.
For the Production Study, we are working on the fricative /s/ duration in final coda position. We
have established a sample compound of 18 gay men from Rio de Janeiro. This sample is stratified by
age and schooling. Our hypothesis are that older gay men - those who were born before or during the
military period when there was repression regarding homosexuality, classified even as a disease - can
assume a different stance according to their linguistic cues and possibly, the younger gay men - after
some LGBT + rights have been established – can be more resembling as the individuals considered in
the English studies. Another question is if there is a different attitude towards gender identity due to the
speaker's macrosocial characteristics such as belonging to different social classes, assessed here through
the speaker's schooling. In order to improve our study, we created a variable called Degree of Identity
Expression/Identification. This variable is a group of characteristics about the person interviewed: if
people know about the sexual orientation of the person; how long these people know that and if the
person thinks he/she shows his/her sexual orientation by the way he/she wears/communicate/gesticulate.
Our goal is an attempt to not focus on binarism of gender.
To complement our Production Analysis, we are thinking of a Perception Study in which we
will organize a Perception Test through the matched guise technique (LAMBERT ET. AL, 1960) using
stimuli of fricative /s/ duration in final coda position, duration of tonic oral vowels and pitch values. The
questions to be answered by this test are: Do homosexual men have a similar speech regarding acoustic
characteristics as heterosexual women? Does the perceiver's gender identity have an effect on
identifying the gender identity of stimuli speakers? Regarding tonic oral vowels, can a longer duration
be considered characteristic of the gay men speech? Is there a correlation between participants'
identification of male homosexual gender identity and controlled language characteristics: longer
duration of posalveolar fricative, longer duration of stressed syllable vowel, and higher pitch values?
During the audio recording, some recorded people said that gay men tend to produce longer
vowels when they are speaking and that they vary in their production of pitch dynamism. These
assumptions are going to be confirmed or not as soon as the perception test will be analyzed by different
perceivers/hearers from different sexual orientation.
Our next steps, until the date of this presentation, include to finish interview’s transcriptions and
to collect data to stablish the production study and select the “natural” stimuli for the test of perception
and the the Pilot test creation and application.
References
CAMERON, D. & KULICK, D. Language and sexuality. CUP: New York, 2003.
GAUDIO, R. P. Sounding gay: Pitch properties in the speech of gay and straight men. American Speech,
69(1), 30, 1994.
LINVILLE, S. E. Acoustic correlates of perceived versus actual sexual orientation in men's speech.
Folia Phoniactrica et Logopaedica, 50, 35–48, 1998.
PIERREHUMBERT, J., BENT, T., MUNSON, B., BRADLOW, A. R., & BAILEY, M. (2004). The
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PODESVA, Robert J. Three sources of stylistic meaning. In Terra Edwards, Kate Shaw, SarahWagner
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TRACY Erick C., BAINTER Sierra A., SANTARIANO Nicholas P. 2015 “Judgments of self-identified
gay and heterossexual male speakers: Which phonemes are most saliente in determining sexual
orientation?” Journal of Phonetics 52 (2015): 13-25.