Schwartz (1968) determined that the sex/gender of an English speaker could be accurately distinguished based on isolated voiceless alveolar fricatives (i.e. tokens of /s/) and that women tend to have higher peak frequency in /s/ than men. Stuart- Smith et al. (2003) discovered that of the variables they considered, only /s/ showed a clear and consistent gender distinction, with women having an overall higher mean and peak; both of these measurements are based on the midpoint frequency of the spectral curve. It is important to note that higher measurements did not apply to a specific group of participants in the Stuart-Smith et al study and these participants will be discussed further below. Podesva and Van Hofwegen (2014) write that as men tend to have longer vocal tracts than women, /s/ realisations tend to be lower in frequency for men than women, causing men to have a lower spectral centre of gravity than women. Therefore, data has consistently shown that /s/ can be used to signify a speaker’s gender.
Productions of /s/ regularly show a significant gender distinction, and this makes it an ideal segment to study with respect to language and sexual orientation. If a token is generally realised in a certain way for a particular gender, it may be telling if a person of that same gender but of differing sexual orientation varies in their
production from the statistical norm for their gender. And if they were to vary, how great, and of what sort, is the variation? As most of the previous research has been conducted without considering sexual orientation, it is important to fill in these gaps and understand the patterns in /s/ when sexual orientation is the variable of interest. Another reason /s/ is an ideal variable when considering language and sexual orientation is that research has shown that /s/ may be modified in order to index certain identity factors for a speaker. The Stuart-Smith et al (2003) study cited above investigated /s/ realisations in connection with sex, gender, and social class. They found that the /s/ realisations of working-class girls in Glasgow aligned more closely to those of male speakers than those of other groups of female speakers. Working-class girls had a higher spectral skew with values closer to 0 and closer to the male range, as opposed to working-class women, who had negative values. If
this group of female speakers is signalling identity factors, particularly gender and class, by producing characteristic /s/ realisations, it is plausible that other groups of speakers may also show signs of variation in /s/ to signal other identity factors.
2.5.2.1 Fricative and Sexual orientation
The study of /s/ has also been a cornerstone of sexuality research in linguistics due in large part to the stereotype of the “gay lisp”. Munson and Babel (2007) discuss the prevalence of the gay lisp in popular culture, from television shows to books and stand-up comedy. This stereotype has in itself led to a considerable amount of linguistic research investigating /s/, in both production and perception, in connection with sexual orientation. The stereotype of the gay lisp is associated specifically with gay men and it is partly for this reason that much of the previous linguistic work on /s/ and sexual orientation has focused on male speech. Crist (1997) studied the duration of onset consonants over two experiments in the speech of six participants – two self-identified straight men and four self-identified gay men. He found that the friction in /sp/ and /sk/ clusters had a longer duration in the gay male voices than in the straight male voices. Smyth and Rogers (2003) also found that /s/ and /z/ had a longer duration and a higher peak frequency for gay-sounding men. More
recently, however, there has been a wider range of phonetic research that also considers gay female speakers with respect to /s/ production.
Strand and Johnson (1996) synthesised a /s/ to /ʃ/ continuum and found that
participants’ perceptions of /s/ or /ʃ/ were significantly influenced by visual cues that presented either a male or female face while individual stimuli were heard. Though the same stimuli were played to all the participants, those sound clips that were paired with a male face were more likely to be perceived as /s/ and those paired with a female face were more likely to be perceived as /ʃ/. Munson, Jefferson, and McDonald (2006) studied perceptual differences in the continuum of /s/ to /ʃ/ and also found that productions which were acoustically nearer a canonical /ʃ/ were heard as /s/ when the voice was perceived to be that of a man, but as /ʃ/ when believed to be that of a woman. They also observed that /s/ produced by voices that were perceived to be those of gay women were more likely to be perceived as /s/ than voices perceived to be from straight women. Women believed to be gay were
heard, therefore, as being more masculine. This work shows that sexual orientation may influence at least the perception of /s/.
In a study based in Northern California, Podesva and Van Hofwegen (2014) studied the centre of gravity of /s/ in relation to several factors: gender, sexual orientation, and whether the participant was more country- or town-oriented. They found that straight country men had the lowest average centre of gravity and straight town men had the second lowest average. Straight town women had the highest average centre of gravity, with straight country women having the second highest. In Podesva and Van Hofwegen’s study, straight speakers set the poles of the continuum for centre of gravity in productions of /s/ and LGBTQ speakers made up the middle. This
demonstrates that it is possible that the LGBTQ speakers in the community were indexing their sexual orientation or gender identity through their pronunciation of /s/.
A final study of /s/ production in connection to sexual orientation to consider is work done by Saigusa (2016). This study examines the effect the addressee has on the speaker and the centre of gravity of the speaker’s /s/ production. In the study, two interviews with Jane Lynch, an openly gay actress, were analysed. The first interview was by an openly gay news reporter and the second was with two female TV hosts considered not gay by Saigusa. (The other hosts may not identify as straight, but as they are married to men it is unlikely they identify as gay.) Saigusa found that Lynch had a lower centre of gravity in /s/ when speaking with the openly gay news reporter than when speaking to the non-gay TV hosts. It was also found that when Lynch was discussing LGBTQ issues she had a lower centre of gravity than when she was discussing other topics, such as beginning her acting career. Though there is no equivalent of a gay lisp for gay women in popular culture, it would be logical to also study the features of the production of /s/ with gay women if it is being used to index social categories such as gender and social class.