Gato, J.; Fontaine, A. M.; Carneiro, N. S. (2012). Multidimensional scale of attitudes toward lesbians and gay men: Construction and preliminary validation. Paidéia 22/51: 11–20.

Eckert, P., 2016. Variation, meaning and social change. In: N. Coupland, ed. Sociolinguistics. Theoretical Debates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Holmes-Elliott, S., & Levon, E. (2017). The substance of style: Gender, social class and interactional stance in /s/-fronting in southeast England. Linguistics, 55(5), 1045– 1072.

Labov, W. (1993). The unobservability of structure and its linguistic consequences. Paper presented at the 22nd New Ways in Analyzing Variation conference, University of Ottawa, October 22–25.

Levon, E. & Buchstaller, I. (2015). Perception, cognition, and linguistic structure: The effect of linguistic modularity and cognitive style on sociolinguistic processing. Language Variation and Change 27: 319-348.

Mendes, R. B. (2016) Nonstandard plural noun phrase agreement as an index of masculinity. In: Levon, E.; Mendes, R. B. Language, sexuality and power: Studies in intersectional sociolinguistics. Oxford University Press.

Oushiro, L. (2019). A computational approach for modeling the indexical field. Revista de Estudos Linguísticos 27(4): 1737-1786.

Pharao, N.; Maegaard, M.; Møller, J. S.; Kristiansen, T. (2014). Indexical meanings of [s+] among Copenhagen youth: Social perception of a phonetic variant in different prosodic contexts. Language in Society, 43, 1–31.

Rácz, P., & Schepácz, A. (2013). The perception of high frequency sibilants in Hungarian male speech. Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 60(4), 457–468.

Sene, M. G. (2022). A percepção sociolinguística de gênero e sexualidade: Efeitos da duração de /s/ e do pitch médio. PhD Thesis. Universidade Estadual Paulista.

Gender/sexuality-based meanings of /s/ realizations have been studied extensively in English and other European languages (Holmes-Elliott & Levon 2017; Pharao et al. 2014; Rácz & Schepácz 2013, inter alia). In (Brazilian) Portuguese, this scenario is changing; for example, Mendes (2016) shows that male voices can be perceived as more effeminate- and gay-sounding in guises with plural /-s/ (NPs: as casa-S ‘the houses’) and more masculine-sounding in guises lacking /-s/ (NPø: as casa-Ø). More recently, Sene (2022) shows that longer /-s/ also contributes to the perception of effeminacy and gay-soundingness in male voices. This paper discusses perception data from an experiment with audio clips combining NP number agreement (NPagr) (Mendes 2016), /-s/ lengthening (Sene 2022), and lower vs. higher F0 (the latter, a stereotype of femininity – Sene 2022). Hypothetically, the indexicality of these variables would converge, with male voices being more frequently perceived as more effeminate/gay-sounding in guises with NPs, longer /-s/, and higher F0. However, our data show something different.
Using the same four voices as Mendes (2016), the combination of NPagr (NPø or NPs), F0 (original or +30Hz) and /-s/ duration (original or +80ms average) generated 32 guises (8 per speaker); 204 participants listened to each male voice in one of the possible combinations and evaluated them on scales addressing social attributes including effeminacy and gay-soundingness. Participants were also asked to answer a questionnaire intended to assess their attitudes towards male homosexuality (Gato, Fontaine & Carneiro 2012). A Principal Components Analysis of response data reveals that the first and most significant component comprises the scales for effeminacy and gay-soundingness in an expected positive correlation. Taking the scores generated for this component as a dependent variable, we built regression models to test the effects of the linguistic variables and listener’s social characteristics (gender, age, education and attitudes toward homosexuality, among others).
Results show that the male voices were perceived as more effeminate/gay-sounding in their F0+30Hz and longer /-s/ guises, regardless of participants’ social characteristics. The results for NPagr were unexpected: listeners with positive attitudes toward male homosexuality perceived the male voices as more effeminate/gay-sounding in their NPø guises. This new finding aligns with a representation of the indexical field of NPagr using Minimum Spanning Trees (Oushiro 2019), which shows that “effeminate” and “gay” are more frequently associated with NPø than NPs.
As our findings are different from those proposed by earlier studies of the link between NPagr and gender/sexuality-based meanings, they also further illustrate the underspecification of the relationship between a linguistic form and its social meanings (Eckert 2016). Additionally, our data rekindle the issue around the Interface Principle (Labov 1993; Levon & Buchstaller 2015), since perceptions associated with NPagr (a grammatical variable) are likely either subsumed by the indexicality of /-s/ or may be actually phonetically based. Furthermore, our study provides evidence for the crosslinguistic salience of /-s/ and F0 in the perception of male voices, adding Portuguese to the list of languages in which those variables have been analyzed in reference to gender and sexuality.