Creaky voice prevalence across Sydney

Abstract

Creaky voice is a voice quality that has been associated with various social categories such as gender, age, and socioeconomic status in previous literature. However, few studies have investigated creaky voice in relation to linguistic or ethnic heritage. Using a corpus of conversational speech from 131 Australian English-speaking teenagers who live in various areas across Sydney characterized by differences in linguistic and ethnic diversity, we explore how creaky voice use is influenced by gender and ethnic heritage. Creaky voice is automatically detected using the optimized Union method (White et al., 2022, JASA), which employs a combination of acoustic cues to identify the various phonetic realizations of creaky voice. Findings show that creaky voice use is highly variable across Sydney indicating that a complex relationship exists between creaky voice prevalence, speaker gender and ethnic heritage. This study shows that while variability may correlate with social groupings, other factors, such as a speaker’s orientation towards their community, may contribute to levels of creaky voice prevalence.