Graduation Year

2025

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Linguistics and Cognitive Science

Reader 1

Mary Paster

Reader 2

Carmen Fought

Abstract

Sociolinguistics has long concerned itself with the variation of speech between different demographics (Labov, 1972). Building upon the theories that individuals construct their speech to indicate their identity or association with a group (Eckert, 1989), and that such constructed speech can be altered to fit the specific conversational context a speaker is navigating (Bucholtz, 1999), this paper attempts to examine the effects of a romantically oriented setting on one’s speech. Hypothesizing that this type of setting will result in speakers foregrounding their gender and sexual identities, it aims to determine whether speech differences will arise among these distinctions. It measures the pitch ranges of male-presenting and female-presenting participants in both opposite-gendered and same-gendered environments. Data are derived from videos of an online speed dating show called The Button, published by the YouTube Chanel Cut. Statistically insignificant results were yielded for all groups. Most values were highly insignificant, but two groups approached significance: men speaking to other men when compared to men speaking to women, and men who rejected their male partners when compared against men who did not reject their male partners.

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