Honing in on who sounds gay

press release from the American Institute of Physics reports (and thanks to investigator Hugh Henry for bringing it to our attention):

Vowel Sounds Give Cues to Sexual Orientation

College Park, Md. (May 18, 2011) — It is not uncommon for us to draw knee-jerk conclusions about people based on how they speak. Those snap judgments aren’t always inaccurate—even when based on less than a single word, according to a new study to be presented at this month’s Acoustical Society of America meeting in Seattle. “This is a phenomenon that occurs every day,” says study leader Erik C. Tracy, a cognitive psychologist at Ohio State University….

This continues (perhaps in parallel, or perhaps tangentially, rather than directly) a line of research we described back in 2007.

BONUS: This is the same Dr. Tracy who won $15,000 on the TV program “Who Wants to Be a Millionnaire?”. Dr. Tracy is also included in the Buckeye Corpus Personnel.