Voice quality variation and gender

Abstract

Recent work on American English has established that speakers increasingly use creaky phonation to convey pragmatic information, with young urban women assumed to be the most active users of this phonetic feature. However, no large-scale acoustic or articulatory study has established the actual range and diversity of voice quality variation along gender identities, encompassing different sexual orientations, regional backgrounds, and socioeconomic statuses. The current study does exactly that, through four methods: (1) subjects identifying with a range of gender and other demographic identities were audio recorded while reading wordlists as well as a scripted narrative assuming characters’ voices designed to elicit variation in vowel quality. Simultaneously, (2) electroglottographic readings were taken and analyzed to determine the glottal characteristics of this voice quality variation. (3) Subjects were then asked to rate recordings of other people’s voices to identify the personal characteristics associated with the acoustic reflexes of phonation; in the final task, (4) subjects were explicitly asked about their language ideologies as they relate to gender. Thus, the current study explores the relation between gender identity and phonetic features, measured acoustically, articulatorily, and perceptually. This work is currently underway and preliminary results are being compiled at this time.