Gender, sexuality, and fricative variation in a post-spectral moments world

Spectral moments are widely used to characterize variation in fricative spectra (Forrest et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 84, 115–123 1988). One piece of evidence for their utility comes from studies showing that spectral moments for the fricative /s/ predict listeners’ judgments of the gender and sexual orientation of the person talking (Munson et al., J. Phon 34, 202–240 2006; Munson, Lang. Speech 50, 125–142 2007). Recent work has shown that spectral moments are suboptimal, as each moment indexes multiple underlying articulatory parameters. Shadle recently proposed a series of alternative measures that are more closely related to articulation than spectral moments (J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 153, 1412–1426 2023). In this presentation, the analyses originally presented in Munson et al. 2006 and Munson 2007 are reanalyzed using Shadle’s proposed measures. Those studies examined the acoustic characteristics of /s/ in gay, lesbian and heterosexual men and women, and listener ratings of the talkers’ masculinity–femininity and sexual orientation. Preliminary results show that the relationship between fricative acoustics and perceptual judgments is qualitatively different for the new measures and for spectral moments, consistent with Shadle 2023. More generally, these findings call for future sociophonetic studies of fricative variation to use these newer measures.