Functions and social meanings of click sounds in Irish English

This study investigates the use and function of click sounds in Irish English. These paralinguistic elements are multifunctional and similar to linguistic discoursepragmatic markers. In addition to their discourse and pragmatic functions, they also index social meanings and are shown to be connected with assertive and authoritative stances

Pitch in native and non-native Lombard speech

Lombard speech, speech produced in noise, is typically produced with a higher fundamental frequency (F0, pitch) compared to speech in quiet. This paper examined the potential differences in native and non-native Lombard speech by analyzing median pitch in sentences with early- or late-focus produced in quiet and noise. We found an increase in pitch in late-focus sentences in noise for Dutch speakers in both English and Dutch, and for American-English speakers in English. These results show that non-native speakers produce Lombard speech, despite their higher cognitive load. For the early-focus sentences, we found a difference between the Dutch and the American-English speakers. Whereas the Dutch showed an increased F0 in noise in English and Dutch, the American-English speakers did not in English. Together, these results suggest that some acoustic characteristics of Lombard speech, such as pitch, may be language-specific, potentially resulting in the native language influencing the non-native Lombard speech

Vocal Fry: Acoustics, Airflow, and EGG Analysis of Various Types

Objective: Current studies on vocal fry at BGSU involve categorizing various types of vocal fry production (Proctor et al., 2019 ASHA conference). The objective of the current study was to characterize vocal fry types using acoustic, airflow, and electroglottographic measures. Such characterization should shed light on the physiological production of vocal fry and potential clinical understanding and intervention. Methods/design: Three men and three women, 18-22 years old, read the Rainbow passage as well as spoke conversationally and spontaneously in a sound treated booth. The participants spoke using a microphone and an EGG system (Kay Model 6103), as well as with and without the use of a face mask (Glottal Enterprises MSIF-2 system). The participants were asked to speak normally. There was no mention of vocal fry to them. Results: A number of the categories of vocal fry were found in the corpus (e.g., single pulses, double pulses, multiple pulses, period doubling, delayed fry). Also the corpus included interesting results for rough voice and aperiodic segments. The figure below shows an example of period doubling. The laryngeal aspect shows a range of glottal closing and opening secondarily to the primary glottal closing and opening (the bottom EGG signal), both occurring in the period of two normal cycles (shown to the left). This example is similar to almost all others in the sense that the glottal activity typically follows the wideband airflow activity (middle trace) as well as the acoustic signal (top trace). Conclusions: The study emphasizes the reality of the laryngeal function in the production of vocal fry, wherein the acoustic transients and various timing of glottal pulses can be seen in all three signals (acoustic, airflow, glottographic). This suggests that the primary cause of vocal fry is laryngeal, but seen and heard as sequences of transients both acoustic and aerodynamic

The Effect of Focus on Creaky Phonation in Mandarin Chinese Tones

Previous studies of the prosodic realization of focus in Mandarin Chinese show an expansion of the pitch range of lexical tones. It is less clear, however, whether focus affects the Creaky Phonation (CP) that often co-occurs with the Dipping third tone (T3), and to some extent, also with the Falling fourth tone (T4). This study investigates the effect of focus on the acoustic properties of the four Mandarin tones, and while it confirms the expansion of the pitch range under focus, it does not find that focus affects CP in T3; it only finds an effect of focus on CP in T4. Both the F0 and CP patterns are also considered in relation to the Functional Load Hypothesis, specifically, the relationship between the contrastive properties of a language and the manifestation of prominence

Categorization of Vocal Fry in Running Speech

The purpose of this study was to examine and categorize patterns of vocal fry in running speech. Since no other research studies have attempted to fully categorize vocal fry before, and due to the universality of the phenomenon of vocal fry, and the potential psychosocial and voice disorder consequences that come with using it, this topic is of great significance. For this study, voice samples were read into Praat and analyzed, and minor differences in the physiologies that produce different “types” of fry were examined.Temporal categories of vocal fry discovered were as follows: “onset,” “earlier,” “later,” and “final,” depending on if the fry occurs at the onset of the syllable, earlier in the syllable, later in the syllable, or at the final part (end) of the syllable. Different physiological categories of the fry were explored as well, including “single pulse,” “double pulse,” and “multiple pulse,” which refer to the number of glottal pulses within the fry production. Other physiological categories described in this study include period doubling fry, delay fry, and inaudible fry. As for frequency of occurrence of these categories, fry in the onset of the syllable and early in the syllable tended to be the most common. Single pulse fry was the most frequent physiological pattern exhibited by the speakers in the study

How Black Does Obama Sound Now?: Testing Listener Judgments of Intonation in Incrementally Manipulated Speech

Recent research in perceptual sociolinguistics has investigated a host of variables—primarily segmental—to assess the extent to which social meanings are constructed in perception similarly to the way they are constructed in ongoing production. Despite production research in sociolinguistics that has demonstrated how speakers use intonational variation to index various ethnic identities and social stances (Burdin 2015, Holliday 2016, Reed 2016), there has been a general lack of perceptual research on the social meanings of intonational variables. At the same time, research in perceptual sociolinguistics has not confronted the issue of whether social meanings are incremental—that is, does a more phonetically extreme token of a socially marked variable correspond to a stronger social meaning? We address these gaps in research by testing listener judgments of manipulations of Barack Obama\u27s utterances in one interview. In this perceptual task, critical stimuli were declarative Intonational Phrases with H* and/or L+H* pitch accents (Beckman et al. 2007) that were manipulated to four manipulation steps, with successively more extreme F0 maxima and minima with each step. Ninety-three American English listeners rated 80 critical stimuli and 40 filler stimuli (excerpted from the same interview of Obama) on the question, How Black does Obama sound here? , using a slider bar. A mixed-effects regression model was conducted for listener ratings of blackness by assessing the interaction of Phrase Type (H* only vs. L+H*) and Manipulation Step. Listeners perceived stimuli with at least one L+H* token as sounding more black than those without, but only for phrases with more phonetically extreme realizations of the L+H* contour. These results demonstrate that listeners are sensitive to stepwise manipulations of the F0 contour, indicating that incrementality affects social meanings of intonational variables and providing a promising new direction for studies on listener judgments of ethnicity

Creaky, She Spoke: Examining f0, Vocal Creak, and Perceptions of Young Women’s Professionalism

Recent sociolinguistic work on creak (also known as vocal fry, vocal creak, and creaky voice) has generally focused on its gendered use and perceptions, and more specifically on creak and young women. While Yuasa (2010) found creaky young women to be perceived as “educated, professional, and upwardly mobile” (p.316) sounding, Anderson et al. (2014) and Gallino and Pinto (2021) found the opposite in that creaky young women were perceived to be “less competent, less educated, less trustworthy, less attractive, and less hireable” (p.5). However, all of these works consider creak in isolation, eschewing analyses that examine creak in tandem with other linguistic variables. As voices are perceived as a whole unit, and not singular linguistic features, this leads to an incomplete understanding of the ways in which listeners might perceive creak differently when it is paired with other features such as f0, prosody, and phonetic variation related to dialect, etc. Work examining creak interacting with other linguistic features will provide better understanding for how, when, and why creak is perceived in specific ways by listeners. This study interrogates whether there is an interaction between f0 and creak that might affect professionalism perceptions of speakers and, additionally, how a listeners’ speech attitudes about women and creak might mediate f0 and creak’s effects on professionalism ratings. 125 participants rated stimuli produced by five young white women from the Midland region sourced from the Nationwide Speech Project corpus (Clopper and Pisoni 2004) on six Likert scales: professional, attractive, friendly, feminine, educated, and authoritative. Additionally, participants completed a set of workplace and women’s speech attitudes Likert scale measures (e.g., “to be successful in the workplace, young women should change how they speak to sound more professional”). The presence of creak in stimuli was determined via impressionistic listening and examining spectrograms in Praat. Factor analysis showed that ratings for the six traits patterned into two factors: “Competence” and “Warmth”. These two factors were used as dependent measures in linear mixed effects regression models, with average ratings for both factors as the dependent variables. The Competence model included main effects for Workplace Sexism attitudes (p\u3c.001) and f0 (p\u3c.01), but failed to reproduce findings from the aforementioned previous studies with regards to creak. This study supports previous work by Parker and Borie (2017) that calls for more nuanced and complex analyses of creak moving forward, and the need to move beyond attempting to examine creak as a variable in isolation. It also points to the possibility that the indeterminacy of previous findings on creak and social meaning can be attributed, in part, to differences in experimental design

“That’s What It Felt Like, ‘You’re Pathetic’”: Creaky voice, Affective Stance, and Authentication in the Speech of Lady Gaga

This paper contributes to research on the social meaning of creaky voice in American English by offering an intraspeaker analysis of the speech of Lady Gaga, an American pop star. While pop stars have anecdotally been said to employ creaky voice extensively (Jaslow 2011), few linguists have examined the extent of their use, or what they may be using it to achieve. This study, combining statistics, discourse analysis, and media studies, argues that creaky voice has a core indexical meaning linked to “low emotional energy”, and Lady Gaga draws on this meaning to portray herself as “serious” and “downtrodden”