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Previous investigations into creak (vocal fry or pulse phonation) concentrated on two aspects: establishment of the physiological, acoustic, or perceptual nature of creak compared with other phonations; or separation of its characteristics in normal speech from pathological voices. The approach here is entirely different. Taking the phonetic and linguistic incidence of creak in normal speech in two accents of English as a starting point, quantitative description of its occurrence is provided. Data are taken from large numbers of speakers producing meaningful utterances in a recording task unrelated to voice quality. Support is given to the previous (unquantified) notion that creak accompanies utterance-final low falls and may be a turn-relinquishing signal. In addition, important cross-accent and cross-sex differences in the usage of creak are revealed. The results indicate that future descriptions of male-female voice quality differences should acknowledge creak as an important sociophonetic marker. Furthermore, phonological accounts of accents should incorporate information about a community voice quality. Last, clinicians will benefit from a quantitative account of creak in “normal voice” and may be led to adjust their parameters of abnormality accordingly.

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working-class (WC) and middle-class (MC) middle-aged women. Some F m, F2 patterns are compatible with auditory predictions of a hierarchy of vocalic susceptibility to contrasting voice quality settings. [Work supported by SSHRCC.] 10:05 4SP5. Acoustic variability in the vowels of female and male speakers.When vowel formant values for female and male speakers are normalized and plotted in an F1-F2 space, it is striking that the quadrilateral spaces for the females are uniformly larger than those for the males. Data will be presented from seven languages and dialects, including three dialects of English, which indicate that, all other things being equal, female speakers appear to produce vowels in a manner that is more phonetically explicit than males do. It is particularly in the F1 dimension that the females' quadrilaterals extend beyond the males'; it may be inferred that female speakers articulate vowels with a more open mouth than males do. Can one expect that speakers with a higher k'0 automatically have a larger vowel space? Are females making more of an effort to keep vowels distinct, and potentially contribute to greater intelligibility? Or do females over-articulate, avoiding reduced or centralized forms, as a result of social expectations to be conservative "guardians" of the language? Acoustic and sociophonetic answers to such questions will be offered. In addition, data will be presented from three dialects of English which show that female speakers are not uniform in their behavior: some females merge vowels more often than males do, while other female populations appear to differentiate the same vowels more systematically. The perceived social prestige of an accent is offered as one explanation for these disparate directions of change. 10:30 4SP6. Durational effects of prosodic structure in spontaneous spoken French. Henrietta J. Cedergren, Louise Levac, and H61•ne Perreault (Dept. de Linguistique, Univ. du Qu6bec/t Montr6al, C.P. 8888,