LAUSR

The vast majority of research on speech patterns in the queer community has focused on gay and lesbian speakers. This study aims to expand our knowledge of speech in the queer community by focusing on the speech cues of adult bisexual speakers. For this study, adult lesbian, gay, bisexual, and straight cisgender American English speakers recorded the “Fire passage,” the “Rainbow passage,” and a description of their hometown. Vocal characteristics, such as duration, pitch, voice quality, formants, and speech rate, were measured to observe the differences between speech patterns of adult bisexual speakers and other queer and straight identities. The results suggest that bisexual and lesbian female speakers have naturally lower average pitch while straight speakers go up in pitch. Bisexual speakers maintain their pitch range between natural and read speech, while lesbian speakers have a wider pitch range during natural speech and straight speakers during read speech. The speech rate of bisexual and straight ...