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.Īnother important trait that seems to be influenced by sexual orientation and used as a cue to assess is speech.
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., 1999 Rieger et al., 2010 Valentova et al., 2011 Wang & Kosinski, 2018). In addition to the fact that homosexuals exhibit traits that differ from those of heterosexuals, it has been shown that some of them, such as specific neural processes (LeVay, 1991 Savic, Berglund, & Lindstrom, 2005) or specific childhood behaviors (Alanko et al., 2010 Bailey & Zucker, 1995), displayed values shifted toward those of the opposite sex, i.e., a feminization in homosexual men and a masculinization in homosexual women (Pierrehumbert et al., 2004). Differences between heterosexual and homosexual individuals have thus been studied on a diverse set of traits such as face (e.g., Freeman, Johnson, Ambady, & Rule, 2010 González-Álvarez, 2017 Lyons, Lynch, Brewer, & Bruno, 2014 Rieger, Linsenmeier, Gygax, Garcia, & Bailey, 2010 Skorska, Geniole, Vrysen, McCormick, & Bogaert, 2015 Wang & Kosinski, 2018), olfaction (e.g., Sergeant, Dickins, Davies, & Griffiths, 2007), behavior (e.g., Ambady, Hallahan, & Conner, 1999 Rieger, Linsenmeier, Gygax, & Bailey, 2008 Valentova, Rieger, Havlicek, Linsenmeier, & Bailey, 2011), cognition (e.g., Neave, Menaged, & Weightman, 1999 Xu, Norton, & Rahman, 2017), and voice (e.g., Gaudio, 1994 Munson, McDonald, DeBoe, & White, 2006b Pierrehumbert, Bent, Munson, Bradlow, & Bailey, 2004 Rendall, Vasey, & McKenzie, 2008).
The gender atypicality hypothesis suggests that gender atypical traits in homosexuals could be used as cues to indicate sexual orientation. 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. Lastly, testosterone levels did not influence any of the investigated acoustic features. 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. 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). Lastly, we examined whether testosterone levels mediated the association between speech acoustic features and sexual orientation. 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.
Lastly, no studies investigated so far the potential role of testosterone in the association between sexual orientation and speech acoustic features. Moreover, most studies have been conducted with English-speaking populations, which calls for further cross-linguistic examinations. 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. Potential differences between homosexual and heterosexual men have been studied on a diverse set of social and biological traits.