Munson wanted to explore how the crisp “s” speech style might emerge in young men. He hypothesized that boys who would eventually identify as gay would, as their speech developed, gradually diverge from their peers in an increasingly crisp pronunciation of “s.” To test the idea, Munson chose a unique population: 5- to 13-year-old boys diagnosed with gender dysphoria. These children feel a distressing mismatch between the gender they experience and the one assigned them at birth, as well as a desire to be another gender, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. They are also statistically more likely to identify as gay in adulthood, Munson explains. “It’s not like every gay adult was a boy with gender dysphoria, nor does every boy with gender dysphoria become a gay adult,” he says, but “this is the best hope we have for looking at the evolution of this [speech] style within an individual.”
The team looked at 34 boys with gender dysphoria recruited from the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada, and 34 age-matched boys without gender dysphoria. The researchers asked boys from each group to pronounce a series of words and sentences loaded with “s” sounds, such as “The squirrel sat on the seesaw.” They then analyzed the acoustic properties of the recordings. In a crisper “s,” more energy should be concentrated at higher frequencies, and very little energy at lower ones.
Surprisingly, samples from boys with gender dysphoria didn’t show that feature. Instead, they showed a more even spread of energy across the frequency spectrum—a characteristic of the stereotypical, lispy “th” sound that Munson has failed to find in gay adults. Boys without gender dysphoria didn’t show this speech pattern, and as boys with the condition got older they seemed to lose the lisp. It vanished by age 11.
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