Habitual Use of Vocal Fry in Young Adult Female Speakers

Improved automatic detection of creak

“…If low subglottal pressure is a necessary condition for creak, then it is not surprising that it frequently occurs in phrase/utterance/turn-final position, where the speaker will have less air available than at the start of the utterance. Creak has also recently received attention from popular science articles following the study in Wolk and Abdelli-Beruh (2012) which demonstrated that two thirds of the young female American English speakers analysed displayed creak at the end of read sentences. The authors state that continuous use of creak is likely to be more prevalent in more sociable, conversational speech settings (however this was not formally investigated).…”

“…Also, as creak is known to be frequently produced during hesitations (Carlson et al, 2006) its detection could also be used to identify hesitations which could, in turn, be used for distinguishing speaking styles or, for instance, providing feedback on presentation skills. The robust automatic detection of creak would be beneficial for sociological studies (e.g., Wolk and Abdelli-Beruh, 2012) and studies on tonal patterns (Yu and Lam, 2011) in terms of allowing quantitative analysis on larger volumes of data. Furthermore, as studies have shown listeners to be sensitive to creak in terms of recognition of the speaker's identity (Böhm and Shattuck-Hufnagel, 2007), the detection of creak can be exploited for improving speaker recognition systems Elliot, 2002).…”

A comparison of vocal parameters in adult bilingual Hebrew-English speakers

“…This may support a cultural-based explanation of an absence of vocal fry when the same subjects spoke in Hebrew compared to the appearance of vocal fry when speaking in English. The change in vocal parameters in this instance may signify a kind of vocal code switching when bilingual Hebrew/English speakers speak in English compared to Hebrew, given that recent studies have indicated vocal fry as a culturally-accepted vocal norm in Standard American English (28,29) . A final significant perceptual finding was an increase in the perceptual assessment of throaty resonance in Hebrew amongst the total population and in females when compared to a more adequate resonance in English during spontaneous speech.…”

“…Vocal fry, or "creaky voice", refers to a distinct low vibratory pattern produced at the vocal folds. Recent research has identified vocal fry as a current vocal trend in American English, particularly amongst female speakers, but also in males, that is not necessarily attributed as pathological voice behavior (28,29) . This may support a cultural-based explanation of an absence of vocal fry when the same subjects spoke in Hebrew compared to the appearance of vocal fry when speaking in English.…”

“…Evidence from these studies will have important implications for clinicians to be aware of cultural-linguistic impact on voice production when assessing voice and to be sensitive to the existence of varying vocal norms across languages. Specifically, when describing characteristics of an individual's voice that may appear pathological, clinicians should consider in their differential diagnosis whether the feature may be related to the linguistic or cultural properties of that individual's language (12,28,29) . Voice differences attributed to a cultural/linguistic element carry practical implications for the administration of accent modification therapy and professional accent training in which professionals may better assist clients in matching the voice characteristics of the target language, such as a possible increase in intonation and pitch for male speakers when speaking in English as compared to Hebrew or alterations in resonance as indicated in the present study.…”