ABSTRACT

Previous research has identified a range of perceptual voice and speech features that differ between gay and straight men, enabling listeners to determine if a man is gay or straight at a rate better than chance from his voice alone. To date, no published studies have examined if bisexual men’s voices differ from gay and straight men’s voices with regard to perceived masculinity-femininity – nor whether listeners can identify a bisexual man based only on his voice. In the present study, we examined if listeners could identify bisexual men’s sexual identities from voice recordings. Seventy participants (N= 70) rated 60 voice recordings of a sample of 20 gay, 20 bisexual, and 20 straight Australian men on perceived sexual orientation and degree of masculinity-femininity. Participants could correctly categorize the sexual orientations of the gay and straight speakers at rates greater than chance, but bisexual men were only identified at chance. Bisexual voices were consistently misperceived as being the most exclusively female attracted, and, contrary to expectations, were perceived as the most masculine sounding of all the speakers. Together, these findings suggest that while the voices of bisexual men in our sample were perceived as more masculine and female attracted, listeners do not associate this impression with bisexuality, and thus cannot identify bisexual men from their voices. Consequently, while bisexual men appear to be at lower risk of facing voice-based identification and discrimination than gay men, they may be often misperceived as being straight.

摘要

之前的研究已经确定了同性恋者和异性恋者之间一系列不同的感知声音和言语特征，使听众能够比仅凭声音判断一个人是同性恋还是异性恋的速度更好。迄今为止，还没有发表的研究调查双性恋男性的声音在感知男性气质和女性气质方面是否与同性恋和异性恋男性的声音不同，也没有调查听众是否可以仅根据双性恋男性的声音来识别他。在本研究中，我们研究了听众是否可以从录音中识别双性恋男性的性身份。七十名参与者（N= 70）对 20 名同性恋、20 名双性恋和 20 名异性恋澳大利亚男性样本的 60 段录音进行了性取向和男女气质程度的评估。参与者能够以高于偶然的速度正确分类同性恋者和异性恋者的性取向，但双性恋男性只是偶然被识别出来。双性恋的声音一直被误解为最受女性欢迎，而且与预期相反，双性恋的声音被认为是所有说话者中最男性化的声音。总之，这些发现表明，虽然我们样本中双性恋男性的声音被认为更具男性化和女性化，但听众不会将这种印象与双性恋联系起来，因此无法从他们的声音中识别出双性恋男性。最后，