The last issue addressed in our studies refers to
language-specificity that is the question whether listeners are able to recognize the SO of an individual who speaks a different language. Our results seem to show that the process is not language-specific, but that it works similarly with speakers of distinct languages. Differently from previous research by Valentova et al. [
21], our cross-cultural experiments showed that listeners are incorrect in judging SO of both own and other language speakers. The different pattern of results may be easily explained by the fact that the categorization was based solely on voice in our studies, whereas in Valentova's study [
21] participants had both vocal and visual information available when judging the targets’ SO. Thus, the availability of a more complex and rich signal system could indeed facilitate the recognition of people SO, which is an ambiguous feature that is difficult to detect. Nonetheless, both Italian and German listeners in our studies made a distinction between groups of speakers who were perceived as sounding gay or heterosexual, and this was true for both same- and other-language speakers. In fact, there was a surprisingly high agreement (
r = .75) between the judgments of Italian and German listeners, although these judgments rarely coincided with the self-identified SO of the speakers. Although we have no data directly speaking to the question of what cues listeners use when judging the SO of foreign speakers, we may speculate that the process occurs on the basis of the cues of one’s own language: When rating foreign speakers, listeners might rely on those cues that they associate to gayness in their native language. Thus, Germans may rate Italian speakers based on duration and F2 measures, whereas Italians may base their ratings of German speakers on durational measures and /s/ center of gravity. In our data, durational measures were important for listeners of both languages and might, at least in part, explain the agreement in the judgments of listeners of the languages.
However, we cannot exclude that language characteristics other than the acoustic features investigated here might affect the listeners' judgment. In fact, an interesting,
unpredicted finding was that Italian speakers sounded, on average, more gay than German speakers to both Italian and German listeners. It is conceivable that some languages such as Italian and French sound more melodic or “feminine”, whereas others such as German may sound more masculine (for empirical support see [
44,
46,
47]), which in turn may make their speakers appear more or less gay-sounding. However, the perception of languages may not be absolute and universal. Italian may be a gay or feminine language for German, but not for listeners of other languages. If supported by future research across larger samples of languages, this may be a socially relevant case of
sound symbolism, according to which sounds reveal meaning and promote images, a principle that has also been deployed in the creation of brand labels [
48].
