Toronto Workshop on Phonetics, Gender, and Sexual Orientation: Schedule

Reception and registration.
Department Lounge; 6th Floor of Robarts Library, 130 St. George St.

Coffee/breakfast
East Common Room, Hart House

Henry Rogers & Ronald Smyth: opening talk
East Common Room, Hart House

Lunch

Talk 1 Sally McConnell-Ginet: Identity(ies), desire(s), and sound(s): Sociophonetics in language, gender, and sexuality studies
Discussants: Bonnie McElhinny, Jessica Taylor
East Common Room, Hart House

Much recent work in language, gender, and sexuality has taken what Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2003) dub the "performative turn." Rather than starting by categorizing people on the basis of (self- or other-) ascribed gender or sexual identity and then examining how they speak, researchers look at how people use their speech to "do" gender and sexuality, to present themselves (and also others) as certain kinds of people doing certain kinds of things. And along with the focus on "doing" comes an emphasis on examining language situated in ordinary real-life social practice. But how can controlled laboratory studies shed light on linguistic practice in more mundane settings? And given that physical traits such as the shape of the vocal tract and the length and thickness of the vocal cords sharply constrain how one can sound, what does it mean to say that people "perform" the phonetic components of their "styles"? This paper argues that, although there has been relatively little contact between sociophonetics and recent social practice oriented studies of language, gender and sexuality, the two endeavors have much to offer one another.

Talk 2 Gerard Docherty
Discussants: Jack Chambers, Sali Tagliamonte
East Common Room, Hart House

Studies of the phonetic correlates of gender identity and sexual orientation have started to shed some interesting light on how some GLB individuals appear to deploy fine-grained phonetic resources as social markers. The aim of this paper is to further this line of investigation by bringing to bear insights from sociophonetic studies of other populations. I provide an overview of recent work on the sociophonetic correlates of gender identity and sexual orientation, highlighting what appear to be problematic issues relating to study design, analysis methods and interpretation of results. With exemplification from a range of segmental and prosodic variables, I discuss how some of these issues have been addressed in recent projects looking at sociophonetic variation in urban varieties of English in the UK. I consider how lessons learned from this previous work might inform the study of the sociophonetic properties of gender and sexualities in such a way as to enhance our understanding of the learning and representation of sociophonetic variability both in respect of GLB individuals and more generally.

Breakfast

Talk 3 Kevin Heffernan: The coming out of F0 as a social marker of gender
Discussants: Deborah James, Sara Mackenzie
East Common Room, Hart House

It is often claimed that fundamental frequency is the most salient clue to the sex of an adult. Yet, studies of gay-sounding versus straight-sounding speech fail to find a significant difference in average F0. This lack of findings has motivated researchers to claim that “mean fundamental frequency… is not a cue to sexual orientation” (Smyth 2002). My objective is to refine this claim. I argue, based on the evidence from several published studies, that F0 does act as a marker of social identity. This suggests that average F0 should act as a marker of sexual orientation, which is part of our social makeup. Furthermore, transgendered men use average F0 as a marker of gender. This suggests that it is categorical, which explains why significant differences are not found in the gay voice studies. Several tentative reasons why this might be are presented.

Break

Talk 4 Murray Munro: Interpreting listener judgments in speech rating tasks.
Discussants: Jeffrey Steele, James Walker
East Common Room, Hart House

Research in applied phonetics frequently relies on rating data from linguistically unsophisticated listeners whose judgments of randomized speech samples serve as the dependent variable in a variety of types of analyses. Similar kinds of rating data are invaluable in sociophonetic work because they shed light on how listeners use indexical properties of speech to draw inferences about speakers. The use of listener judgments raises a number of interesting problems of analysis and interpretation. Among these, such issues as intra- and inter-judge reliability, interval scaling, consistency across different speech material, and task-related effects are clearly important. Another concern that has emerged is the question of what rating data reveal not only about the speakers being evaluated, but also about the listeners providing the data. Judgments of foreign accentedness, for instance, are influenced both by phonological properties of the speech being rated, and also by the listeners’ linguistic backgrounds and experience. Moreover, as recent research on gender and speech has demonstrated, even reliable judgments from raters may be based on the listeners’ expectations about the meaning of indexical phenomena, rather than on true correspondences between phonetic properties of speech and characteristics of the speakers. These matters will be explored through an examination of rating data from several recent studies. [Based on research supported by SSSHRC.]

Lunch

Talk 5 Molly Babel and Keith Johnson
Discussants: Laura Colantoni, William Idsardi
East Common Room, Hart House

Break

Wrap discussion (led by Rogers/Smyth)
East Common Room, Hart House

Banquet!
Debates Room, Hart House