Abstract

This study examines the stylistic use of ‘creaky voice’ in a single speaker: the American actress Scarlett Johansson. Recently, there has been a marked increase in both media and academic interest in creaky voice, with work by Yuasa (2010) and Wolk et al. (2011) confirming the prevalence of this feature among young American female speakers. Our study was directly motivated by the work of Barry Pennock-Speck (2005), who took a qualitative approach to analyzing the speech of three American actresses for stylistic modulation of their voice quality. The present study focuses on only one American actress (Johansson), who was chosen as she is an established, successful young American female (at time of research) and therefore was an appropriate subject to represent the social group we are discussing. Our materials included six of Johansson’s films that were developed whilst she was between the ages 18–24. This age range falls in line with previous work on creaky voice (Wolk et al. 2011) who defined their age bracket of study as 18–25 years old. We contrasted American and British character roles and noted the level of creak present through both quantitative and qualitative analysis of six films: three in which she played an American and three in which she took on an English (UK) accent. Acoustic data evaluation involved coding for creak on syllabic nuclei and carrying out a statistical analysis to determine significant influences on the pattern we observed. Our qualitative analysis covers the following variables: character traits and personality, time period in which the film is set, and the age of Johansson’s character. Results showed that there was significantly more creak in Johansson’s speech while she was performing in an American role, in line with the study previously conducted by Pennock-Speck. Our qualitative findings suggest that creak is modulated at an additional level, indexing seductiveness and intimacy with the interlocutor.

Highlights

  • Towards the end of the 20th century, creaky voice was considered a marker of male speech and it was posited that women were beginning to adopt this voice quality in order to evoke the authoritative connotations of masculinity (Yuasa 2010)

  • In line with Pennock-Speck’s (2005) conclusions, our study finds that our speaker has higher levels of creak in her speech when playing American character roles compared with British roles, and posit that creak is being used to index contemporariness in the context of being a young American female

  • The salience of creak as a marker of contemporariness may explain why it persists, but is on the rise among young American women, despite a widespread distaste for this phonetic feature as indicated by media coverage of the ‘creaky voice phenomenon’. It is an reproducible and efficient way for a young woman to show that she is a part of a desirable social group, the attractiveness of which outweighs negative feedback from those outside of this social group. This investigation has found quantitative evidence to support the hypothesis that creaky voice is used stylistically by young American females in order to construct certain aspects of their identity, with creak found to index contemporariness in particular

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Summary

Introduction

Towards the end of the 20th century, creaky voice was considered a marker of male speech and it was posited that women were beginning to adopt this voice quality in order to evoke the authoritative connotations of masculinity (Yuasa 2010). Sounds with a glottal place of articulation can cause the surrounding phonetic context to be produced with creak, and some speakers have more creak in their voices inherently It may be present in speech as a result of environmental and contextual factors such as tiredness and age, or as the result of a speech disorder (Wolk et al 2011). In line with Yuasa (2010), they found that two-thirds of American female speakers displayed habitual usage of vocal fry (creaky voice), noting that creak was significantly more likely to appear at the end of sentences, which informed our decision to include ‘utterance position’ as a variable in this work

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