This paper furthers our understanding of the social forces driving prosodic variation by reporting on production and perception studies of phrase-final posttonic lengthening in American English. Building on past research showing gender-based variation in the production of phrase-final lengthening, I show that this gender effect surfaces only when comparing straight men and straight women. Gay men and straight women lengthen their phrase-final posttonic syllables equally, and both groups do so more than straight men. A matched-guise social-perception experiment shows that listeners associate increased lengthening not only with femininity and male gayness, but with expressive affect. I suggest that the link between increased lengthening and expressive affect is forged iconically and that this link underlies the gender and sexuality patterns observed in the production study. What surfaces from this work theoretically is how variability in expressions of affect may drive correlations between gender/sexuality-based categories and linguistic variants.

中文翻译：

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将性别、性取向和情感联系起来：词尾后音延长的语言和社会模式

本文通过报道美式英语中词尾后音延长的产生和感知研究，进一步加深了我们对推动韵律变化的社会力量的理解。基于过去的研究表明，在词尾延长的产生中基于性别的差异，我表明这种性别效应只有在比较异性恋男性和异性恋女性时才会出现。男同性恋者和异性恋女性同等地延长他们的词尾后音节，并且两组都比异性恋男性做得更多。一项匹配伪装的社会认知实验表明，听众不仅将增加的延长与女性气质和男性同性恋联系起来，而且还与表达情感联系在一起。我认为增加的延长和表达情感之间的联系是标志性的，并且这种联系是生产研究中观察到的性别和性行为模式的基础。从理论上来说，这项工作的表面是情感表达的可变性如何推动基于性别/性行为的类别和语言变体之间的相关性。