Why do gay guys have high voices

Another important trait that seems to be influenced by sexual orientation and used as a cue to assess is speech. [4] In older work, speech pathologists often focused on high pitch among men, in its resemblance to women, as a defect.

Potential differences between homosexual and heterosexual men have been studied on a diverse set of social and biological traits. Combined with the literature conducted in other languages, our findings bring new support for the feminization hypothesis and suggest that the feminization of some acoustic features could be shared across languages.

Why do some gay men “sound” gay? If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Lastly, we examined whether testosterone levels mediated the association between speech acoustic features and sexual orientation. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Indeed, both components are sexually dimorphic as women exhibit significantly higher values of HNR i.

The "gay voice" is usually a result of men adapting their speech patterns to be more socially compatible with women. Testosterone, a male sex hormone, has thus been intensively studied as it was found to be associated, for instance, with facial e.

Official websites use. Some gay men have feminine tendencies and therefore socialize with women more than men. To fill these gaps, we explored potential differences in acoustic features of speech between homosexual and heterosexual native French men and investigated whether the former showed a trend toward feminization by comparing theirs to that of heterosexual native French women.

Although vocal breathiness has been suggested to be an important component of femininity for female voices Van Borsel et al. Results showed that homosexual men displayed significantly higher pitch modulation patterns and less breathy voices compared to heterosexual men, with values shifted toward those of heterosexual women.

[5] Since the gay community consists of many. Moreover, most studies have been conducted with English-speaking populations, which calls for further cross-linguistic examinations. Lastly, no studies investigated so far the potential role of testosterone in the association between sexual orientation and speech acoustic features.

Lastly, homosexual men seem to produce a more expanded vowel space than heterosexual men for some specific vowels Rendall et al. Moreover, studies have shown that both men and women are able to accurately assess sexual orientation from both sexes from various features such as the face or body movements Ambady et al.

Differences between heterosexual and homosexual individuals have thus been studied on a diverse set of traits such as face e. Lastly, testosterone levels did not influence any of the investigated acoustic features. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material.

After identifying phonetic characteristics that seem to make a man’s voice sound gay, their best hunch is that some gay men may subconsciously adopt certain female speech patterns. Linguists have attempted to isolate exactly what makes gay men's English distinct from that of other demographics since the early 20th century, typically by contrasting it with straight male speech or comparing it to female speech.

Aside these acoustic speech features, other characteristics could vary with sexual orientation, such as vocal breathiness and roughness that are, respectively, captured by the harmonics-to-noise ratio HNR and the jitter. The gender atypicality hypothesis suggests that gender atypical traits in homosexuals could be used as cues to indicate sexual orientation.

For example, popular stereotypes regarding the speech of homosexual men generally attribute speech patterns characteristic of the opposite sex, i. Regarding acoustic features of speech, researchers have hypothesized a feminization of such characteristics in homosexual men, but previous investigations have so far produced mixed results.

Why Do Gay Men

After three years of research, linguistics professors Henry Rogers and Ron Smyth may be on the verge of answering that question. Researches have tried to assess if the feminized traits in homosexual men can be attributable to proximate mechanisms such as the differences in sex hormone levels.

In line with the speech feminization hypothesis, homosexual men could indeed potentially exhibit higher values of HNR and lower values of jitter, but, so far, no studies have tackled this issue. These findings emphasize the idea that specific phenotypic traits may be influenced by sexual orientation and may be used as cues to detect or advertise it.

We studied four sexually dimorphic acoustic features relevant for the qualification of feminine versus masculine voices: the fundamental frequency, its modulation, and two understudied acoustic features of speech, the harmonics-to-noise ratio a proxy of vocal breathiness and the jitter a proxy of vocal roughness.