Abstract
This study examines the status of nonmodal phonation (e.g. breathy and creaky voice) in British English using smartphone recordings from over 2,500 speakers. With this novel data collection method, it uncovers effects that have not been reported in past work, such as a relationship between speakers’ education and their production of nonmodal phonation. The results also confirm that previous findings on nonmodal phonation, including the greater use of creaky voice by male speakers than female speakers, extend to a much larger and more diverse sample than has been considered previously. This confirmation supports the validity of using crowd-sourced data for phonetic analyses. The acoustic correlates that were examined include fundamental frequency, H1*-H2*, cepstral peak prominence, and harmonic-to-noise ratio.
Highlights
Creaky voice—a type of nonmodal phonation resulting from the constriction of the glottis—has inspired a steady stream of frenzied editorials and news pieces in the American and British media over the past decade
The results indicate that male speakers, older speakers, and more educated speakers produce more nonmodal phonation than female, younger, and less educated speakers and that more nonmodal phonation is associated with lower F0
A natural progression of this work would be to conduct a perceptual study of phonation type measures
Summary
Creaky voice—a type of nonmodal phonation resulting from the constriction of the glottis—has inspired a steady stream of frenzied editorials and news pieces in the American and British media over the past decade. The Spectator asked whether “creaky voice make[s] you a female yuppie—or an updated Vicki Pollard?” The Washington Post claimed that it hurts young women’s job prospects, and AARP The Magazine warned that it could damage their vocal cords. Despite this attention from the popular media, there has been little scholarly inquiry into the status of nonmodal phonation in British English since the 1980s (Henton and Bladon, 1985). Phonation types refer to the different methods of producing sound through the vibration of the vocal cords (Keating et al, 2015) These types can be divided into two broad categories: modal and nonmodal. The vocal folds make full contact during the closed phase of the phonatory cycle; this is not the case in nonmodal phonation (Titze, 1995). Ladefoged (1971) represented phonation types as falling on a one-dimensional articulatory continuum based on the degree of glottal constriction, an assumption that underlies much of the literature on this topic (Yuasa, 2010; Keating et al, 2015; Lancia et al, 2016)
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