Girl Talk: Understanding Negative Reactions to Female Vocal Fry

Abstract

Vocal fry is a phonation, or voicing, in which an individual drops their voice below its natural register and consequently emits a low, growly, creaky tone of voice. Media outlets have widely acknowledged it as a generational vocal style characteristic of millennial women. Critics of vocal fry often claim that it is an exclusively female vocal pattern, and some say that the voicing is so distracting that they cannot understand what is being said under the phonation. Claiming that a phonation is so distracting as to prevent uptake of the semantic content of an utterance associated with it is an extreme reaction, especially when accompanied by demands for women to change their phonation. We argue that this reaction limits women's communicative autonomy. We analyze the extreme reaction to female vocal fry, which we characterize as a non-content-based response, from the perspectives of philosophy of language, feminist epistemology, and linguistics. We argue that when fry is heard as annoying and distracting, it is because the hearer interprets the speaker as echoing an utterance from a position of authority to which she is not entitled. We show that this reaction encodes conscious or unconscious sexist attitudes toward women's voices.

Language technology practitioners as language managers: arbitrating data bias and predictive bias in ASR

“…Anderson et al (2014) conclude that women should avoid creaky voice. We reject this conclusion, and point instead toChao and Bursten (2021) for a detailed feminist critique of the response to women's creaky voice(s).…”

Language variation and algorithmic bias: understanding algorithmic bias in British English automatic speech recognition

“…This is evident in the fact that the same linguistic feature is often interpreted differently depending on who produced it. For example, creaky voice, a phonation type commonly also known as "vocal fry", is among English speakers, much more stigmatised and pathologised in young women's speech than men's [5,31]. The terms used to evaluate the feature are also evaluations of the women who use them: "annoying", "grating", "too much to bear" [31,53].…”

“…For example, creaky voice, a phonation type commonly also known as "vocal fry", is among English speakers, much more stigmatised and pathologised in young women's speech than men's [5,31]. The terms used to evaluate the feature are also evaluations of the women who use them: "annoying", "grating", "too much to bear" [31,53]. Similarly, linguistic features common in some varieties of British English, such as "glottal replacement" of /t/ in words like butter or Scotland are stigmatised when used by working class speakers in formal contexts, but interpreted as signalling authenticity and solidarity when used by upper-class speakers (e.g.…”

“…[5] conclude that women should avoid creaky voice to avoid discrimination and similar advice is often given to anyone who doesn't speak the "standard variety" [35]. I strongly reject this conclusion -it is listeners (and hiring committees) and language technologies should resist sexist (language) attitudes [31]. 10…”

“…Right now, Amazon's ASR, machine translation and other natural language processing tools are being used to facilitate surveillance 30 of incarcerated people (and their contacts) in the United States [8]. Arguably, the harms resulting from this use of SLTs are particularly large if these systems exhibit predictive bias as they could result in, for example, criminal investigation based on incorrect transcripts 31 . On the other hand, "fixing" or mitigating predictive bias in this context, risks rendering marginalised populations even more legible [4] (to the state and to corporations) against their wishes (or at least, without their consent).…”