Previous research has shown that tonal second language (L2) experience can enhance the third language (L3) tone perception of native speakers of non-tone languages. However, tone is a multidimensional concept, and phonation type also serves as an important cue in the tone perception of some tone languages. In this study, 38 native English speakers of different Mandarin proficiency levels, 15 native English and 15 native Mandarin speakers, all of whom were naïve to the Wenzhou Wu dialect, participated in an AX discrimination task. The Wenzhou dialect was used for the naïve L3 stimuli because of its breathy voice feature in the low-register tones. Mandarin Tone 3 (T3) is often realized with creaky voice, while in English, creaky voice is a prosodic and sociophonetic marker. We asked whether the exposure to one phonation type (creaky voice) at a different linguistic level (indexical in English, allophonic in Mandarin) could lead to better performance on another phonation type (breathy voice). Our results showed that in addition to its effect on pitch perception, Mandarin-learning experience was associated with higher accuracy in phonation perception for native English speakers, and high-level L2 learners could even outperform native Mandarin speakers. Longer length of Mandarin-learning and Mandarin-immersion experience had a facilitative effect on naïve L3 tone perception, resulting in higher accuracy in the perception of both pitch and phonation to varying degrees. Moreover, the study demonstrated that acoustic similarity significantly affects pitch perception in the initial stages of L3 processing, with acoustically similar tone pairs posing greater perceptual difficulty than dissimilar pairs.

The study’s relevance lies in the growing need to adapt the educational process in the field of vocal art to the challenges of the contemporary music scene, where vocalists’ non-standard vocal techniques and methods in the performance process are becoming increasingly popular. The study aimed to investigate the influence of modern vocal techniques on the development of vocal and vocal ensemble skills of art education students, to determine their effectiveness in the educational process and to consider implementation methods in educational practice. Methods: The study included expert evaluation, a comparative method for evaluating traditional and modern techniques, and an empirical basis: a questionnaire survey of students of music educational institutions. Results: The results of the study have shown that modern vocal techniques such as belting, twang, vocal fry, subtone, creaky voice, whistle register, ingressive phonation, multiphonics, sprechgesang, vocal distortion and yodelling contribute to expanding the performer’s range, enhancing timbral expressiveness, and developing dynamic control. In addition, their use in a vocal ensemble helps to improve the balance of voices, form a harmonious sound and develop intonation coherence. The use of digital technologies in the learning process allows for an objective analysis of vocal parameters and increases the effectiveness of the training process. Conclusions: Modern vocal techniques are powerful tools for improving the vocal training of students in art education institutions. Their implementation in the educational process contributes to improving performance skills, expanding the expressive capabilities of the voice, and optimising ensemble sound. Scientific novelty of the study: The study’s scientific novelty lies in its comprehensive analysis of the impact of modern vocal techniques - belting, twang, vocal fry, subtone, creaky voice, whistle register, ingressive phonation, multiphonics, sprechgesang, vocal distortion, and yodelling - on the formation of professional skills of students of art education institutions. Prospects for future research: Further research could aim to develop specialised methodological guidelines for teachers, adapt modern vocal techniques for different age groups, and analyse the effectiveness of digital tools in vocal teaching.

Abstract The present study comprises the first approximation of the indexical field of Chilean Spanish creaky voice, a type of prosodic variation that is highly understudied in Spanish. This study asks what creaky voice means to listeners and what (social) identities they attribute to its users. Results of a survey collecting both quantitative and open-ended qualitative data from 148 Chilean Spanish listeners point to creaky voice being associated with lower status, familiar relationships, informal and relaxed style, perceived older age (for women talkers) and tall stature (for men talkers). I show that these results mirror embodied and ideological distinctions for creaky voice within this dialect, rather than actual production patterns. This study lays the groundwork for further examinations of the meaning of creaky voice in additional cross-linguistic and cross-cultural settings.

Creaky voice is a linguistic feature that is perceived to have increased in prevalence in English over recent years, particularly in women's speech. However, there is limited empirical evidence for this apparent increase. Using real-time acoustic analysis, we explore whether generational change in creaky voice prevalence can be seen among teenage speakers from Sydney, Australia. We conducted a trend analysis comparing creak prevalence in the speech of 28 teenagers collected in 1989 to 21 teenagers collected 30 years later. Results provide evidence for an increase in creak prevalence over time for young female (but not male) speakers of Australian English.

• English-French bilingual speakers maintain similar voice qualities across languages. • Men’s voices are creakier than women’s, by acoustic measures. • Creaky voice acoustics are distinct from its perception. • If anything, older speakers are creakier than younger speakers, by acoustic measures. • Vocal aging better accounts for variation in creakiness than ongoing sound change. This paper examines the acoustic correlates of creaky voice across language, gender and year of birth to investigate 1) the reliability of cross-linguistic differences in voice quality, 2) the direction and extent of gender differences with respect to creaky voice, and 3) the existence of an ongoing sound change targeting voice quality. Spontaneous speech from 49 Canadian English-French bilingual speakers was collected from publicly available online data sources. This corpus was processed and a range of acoustic measures of voice quality extracted using an automated pipeline with manual checks. Results do not show strong nor consistent evidence for cross-linguistic differences in creak. Regarding gender, men’s voices are unequivocally creakier, indicated by more unreliable f0 tracks, lower H1*–H2*, lower CPP and lower HNR < 500 Hz. As for age, results generally show more creak for older speakers, CPP and HNR < 500 Hz values increasing with YOB while other acoustic measures show no significant differences, suggesting that these effects are more likely due to vocal aging than sound change in progress. Contrary to popular perception and recent work claiming that young women are leaders in creaky voice use, this study finds that acoustic correlates of creak show the exact opposite: men’s voices are creakier and if anything, younger speakers are less creaky. Possible reasons for this discrepancy, reviewing recent perceptual work on creaky voice, are discussed.

Abstract This study investigates how Mandarin listeners evaluate creaky voice across different gendered voices using a matched-guise design. In contrast to findings in American English, where female creak is often evaluated negatively, Mandarin listeners did not display different evaluations of creaky voice based on speaker gender. Personality traits associated with creaky voice, such as attractiveness, competence, likeability, intelligence, and wealth, did not show systematic gender effects in Mandarin, and these dimensions were found to be highly correlated through principal component analysis. These results suggest that the gender bias against creaky female voices observed in American English does not generalize to Mandarin, offering a potential explanation for previously reported crosslinguistic differences in creak identification between American English and Mandarin Chinese. The absence of gender-based social bias in Mandarin may account for listeners’ more phonetically driven identification of creak, making creak more identifiable in low-pitched male voices rather than high-pitched female voices. Taken together, the findings underscore the importance of incorporating social evaluation into speech perception studies and call for further social evaluation studies of creaky voice across various social dimensions and in crosslinguistic contexts.

Introduction: This study focuses on the phonetic assessment of voice quality using speech samples from public school teachers in São Paulo. Purpose: To describe vocal quality settings (VQS) in articulatory, phonatory, muscular tension aspects, and vocal dynamics elements (VDE) in speech samples from teachers in São Paulo. Method: A cross-sectional study with a retrospective collection of 60 speech samples analyzed using the Vocal Profile Analysis Scheme (BP-VPAS). All samples were edited with PRAAT software, and those with a signal-to-noise ratio above 2 were selected to minimize external noise interference. Researchers extracted 40-second semi-spontaneous speech excerpts and grouped them into the Experiment MFC 3.S script for auditory-perceptual tasks. One-third of the samples were repeated for internal consistency, with the script playing them randomly. Results: Perceptual judgments showed high reliability (alpha coefficients: 0.777 and 0.814). Discriminant analysis identified vocal quality settings segregating groups based on vocal dynamics. Key variables included Rough Voice (71.7%), Creaky Voice (48.1%), Vocal Tract Hyperfunction (35.3%), Whisper (32.2%), and Pharyngeal Constriction (43.3%). These findings supported group classifications: Non-Case (no dysphonia), Case I (perceptual alteration only), Case II (laryngeal alteration only), and Case III (combined perceptual and laryngeal alterations). Conclusion: VQS related to muscular tension and supralaryngeal phonatory mechanisms were essential in distinguishing groups, enhancing the understanding of dysphonia among teachers.

This study provides evidence of intra-community variation among lesbian speakers related to individual differences in gender presentation and workspace environment. An analysis is performed on two cues of queer identity- creaky voice and vowel formants – and their variation within lesbian speech across three factors - gender presentation, queer community familiarity, and workspace type. Overall, vowel space expansion and total creak were found to correlate with a more masculine gender presentation; and different creak phrasal patterns were found to correlate with different workspace types. This variation demonstrates the need for a more nuanced investigation of indexing LGBTQ+ identities through speech.

Recent research suggests that creaky voice varies in its acoustics, with some types demonstrating irregular cycles, period doubling, or low fundamental frequency, among other characteristics (Keating et al., 2015; Keating et al., 2023). Much of the research on creaky voice uses audio-visual criteria for determining instances of creaky voice (Dallaston and Docherty, 2020), making the identification of creaky voice largely subjective. There has been an increase in the use of COVAREP (Degottex et al., 2014), an algorithm for detecting creaky voice, particularly in the speech of voice disorder populations (Marks et al., 2023; Roy et al., 2024). However, validation of the algorithm beyond its initial development remains to be tested. In this study, we will examine more than 1500 sound files produced by vocally healthy speakers that have been hand-coded for the presence of creaky voice and compare these to the COVAREP output. In particular, we will examine overall accuracy (same labels for human coders and COVAREP), as well as the audio-visual characteristics of false alarms (COVAREP indicates creaky voice when there is none) and misses (COVAREP indicates no creaky voice when it is present).

In US English, a creaky voice is a natural voice quality used to convey linguistic information. One common use of a creaky voice is to mark the end of a sentence or conversational turn. Despite its linguistic functions, several studies have suggested that listeners have negative attitudes toward creaky voice especially when used by younger women. A previous study in our lab suggested that not all listeners exhibit these negative attitudes when a creaky voice is produced at the ends of sentences. That study found that only older women rated creaky productions to be less pleasant, suggesting a type of self-group distancing. The current study extends these findings by including cisgender men as speakers in addition to cisgender women. Listeners are asked to rate both the hireability and pleasantness of speakers’ voices. Utterances are evenly split between those with creaky voice on the final syllable and those without. The study will examine listener attitudes toward both cisgender men and women speakers and explore the scope of self-group distancing by examining listener gender as well.

Nonpathological creaky voice is a common and natural voice quality with linguistic function, such as indicating the end of an utterance. However, it is also a target of gender-based prejudice, with studies suggesting that women who use creaky voice sound less hirable and less pleasant. A previous study in our lab suggested that not all listeners have negative attitudes toward naturally produced creaky voice when it appears sentence-finally. Instead, this previous study found that older women were the only group of listeners who rated the creaky voice among young women speakers as less pleasant, suggesting a form of self-group distancing. In the current study, we examined the perception of utterances with creaks present across multiple words and compared perception among Black and White older listeners. For hireability, creaky productions were rated more negatively overall, and an interaction suggested that women listeners had even more negative ratings. For pleasantness, creaky productions were rated more negatively overall, and an interaction suggested that White listeners had even more negative ratings. Furthermore, Black men rated all stimuli more pleasant than the other listener groups. Taken together, these findings provide some additional evidence for self-group distancing, as the speakers in the study were primarily White.

This study examined the influence of social status and gender on using voice affectation. The aim of this study is to find out the sociophonetic strategies that are used to convey voice affectation, show which strategies were more frequently used, and discovering the important roles of social status and gender in using voice affectation. The main conclusion of the study was that creaky voice, the frequent use of filler words, and uptalk were the sociophonetic strategies that were used to convey voice affectation. It can also be concluded that, through social status, these affected characters see themselves as influential people in society and their followers imitate their actions; as a result, this leads them to being affected personalities. Moreover, both genders used affectation, but they differ in the strategies that are used to convey voice affectation.

While the field of sociophonetics generally views social meanings of linguistic features as indexical and socially constructed, prosodic features have long been argued to have supposedly natural, iconic, universal associations, according to “biological codes,” for example, the frequency code that links high versus low pitch with small versus large body size, female versus male gender (via sexual dimorphism), and hence, affective meanings like uncertainty versus confidence. This study looks at affective meanings of two features of New Zealand English associated with opposing pitch extremes: Uptalk with high pitch and creaky voice with low. In a matched-guise experiment, listeners of different ages were asked to rate short speech samples from young women containing uptalk and creaky voice on a series of affective meaning scales. Results showed that while uptalk was rated more negatively overall, ratings largely aligned with predicted iconic associations of pitch for each scale. However, there were differences by listener age, especially for creak. We argue these results show that the availability of iconic associations of pitch depends on social factors such as the listeners’ beliefs and experience, such as group differences related to age, which affect the seeming naturalness of a given iconic link.

Within-speaker variability, which results from the plasticity of speech production, is an inherent feature of speaker comparison. This study examines targeted modifications of voice quality, both phonatory and articulatory, in Czech. Fifteen speakers were instructed to read a text in 15 different versions (e.g. palatalised voice, denasalised voice, breathy phonation, or a combination of open jaw and creaky voice). Acoustic analyses revealed that F3 is relatively stable across various voice quality settings, while harmonicity and spectral slope indicators are sensitive to the phonatory modifications. A perceptual test, administered online to 120 participants, showed that palatalised, pharyngealised, creaky, and pressed voice were regarded as most different from the speakers’ habitual voices. Finally, automatic speaker recognition scores were very good with the targeted voice quality modifications, with LLR between 3 and 10. Pressed phonation turned out to have the greatest effect on all three types of analysis.

This article provides a detailed examination of voice quality in word-final vowels in Spanish. The experimental task involved the pronunciation of words in two prosodic contexts by native Spanish speakers from diverse dialects. A total of 400 vowels (10 participants × 10 words × 2 contexts × 2 repetitions) were analyzed acoustically in Praat. Waveforms and spectrograms were inspected visually for voice, creak, breathy voice, and devoicing cues. In addition, the relative amplitude difference between the first two harmonics (H1–H2) was obtained via FFT spectra. The findings reveal that while creaky voice is pervasive, breathy voice is also common, and devoicing occurs in 11% of tokens. We identify multiple phonation types (up to three) within the same vowel, of which modal voice followed by breathy voice was the most common combination. While creaky voice was more frequent overall for males, modal voice tended to be more common in females. In addition, creaky voice was significantly more common at the end of higher prosodic constituents. The analysis of spectral tilt shows that H1–H2 clearly distinguishes breathy voice from modal voice in both males and females, while H1–H2 values consistently discriminate creaky and modal voice in male participants only.

Everyday observations indicate that creaky voice has become common in Finland in recent years. Previous studies suggest that this trend is also occurring in other countries. This cross-sectional study investigates the use of creaky voice among Finnish university students from the 1990's to the 2010's. Material was obtained from a sound archive. It consisted of 200 samples from normophonic speakers (95 males, 105 females; mean age 23.7 years, SD 3.3 years, range 19-35 years). Normophonia was checked by two speech therapists in a preliminary perceptual analysis. Thereafter, two voice specialists rated the amount of creak and strain. A scale of 0-4 was used (0=none, 4=a lot). The inter- and intrarater reliability for the listening evaluations were satisfactory (for creaky phonation, rho=0.611, P < 0.001 for interrater reliability and rho=0.540, P < 0.001 for intrarater reliability; for strain, rho=0.463, P < 0.001 and rho=0.697, P < 0.001 for inter- and intrarater reliability, respectively). These results revealed a significant increase in the amount of perceived creak in females (from 1.04, SD 0.69 to 1.55, SD 1.06; P < 0.05, Mann-Whitney U test). In males, no significant change was found. However, the frequency of creaky voice use increased in both genders. No male speakers from the 1990's were rated as using "a lot" of creaky voice, but 2.3% of male speakers from the 2010's received this rating. Male speakers who were rated "quite a lot" increased from 5.9% in the 1990's to 18.1% in the 2010's. Female speakers rated "a lot" increased from 0% to 6%, and female speakers rated "quite a lot" increased from 7% to 25.8% over the studied time periods. Creaky phonation and strain correlated slightly in males (rho=0.24, P < 0.05) and moderately in females (rho=0.55, P < 0.001). Age did not correlate with the amount of creaky phonation (rho=0.005, P > 0.10 for males, rho=-0.011, P > 0.10 for females). It can be concluded that the prevalence of creaky voice has increased among young Finnish speakers, particularly females.

This study addresses how non-contrastive creaky voice varies among languages and across speakers (as a function of gender). Spontaneous speech from 9 English-French bilingual speakers born and raised in Ontario/Québec was collected from publicly available online data sources, amounting to roughly 5 min of speech per speaker-language pair and 13 992 vowels total. This corpus will reach 40 speakers by the conference. Acoustic analysis consisted of pitch tracking in Praat, providing a proportion of unreliable f0 tracks for each vowel as well as one spectral slope measure (H1*-H2*) and two Harmonics-to-Noise Ratios (CPP and HNR05) as acoustic correlates of creaky voice. Statistical significance was tested using mixed-effects regression models, with fixed effects of language, gender, and utterance position, and maximal by-word and by-speaker random effects. The main results for gender show that men's vowels have more unreliable f0 tracks, lower H1*-H2*, lower HNR05 and somewhat lower CPP, suggesting that male speakers are creakier overall. Regarding language, English displays more unreliable pitch tracking compared to French, providing some evidence for language-dependent vocal settings. Other acoustic correlates of creak, however, do not show consistent cross-linguistic differences.

Creaky voice is a voice quality in which a low amount of subglottal air pressure, a condensed vocal fold structure, and a high closed quotient of vibration combine to create the auditory percept of a series of pulses at a low pitch. While this voice quality is often nonpathological, it can also co-occur with vocal pathologies. Identification of creak in the speech signal is most often done manually. Automatic creak detection algorithms have been created to streamline and produce replicable workflows. These algorithms have steadily increased in reliability, with COVAREP (Degottex et al., 2014) as the newest state-of-the-art. While preliminary studies have demonstrated promising findings using artificial neural networks with clinical data, artificial neural networks typically improve with diverse data testing. The current study implements COVAREP on a novel dataset, both in terms of speakers and speech types. Deidentified patient diagnoses were matched to audio recordings collected from January 2021 through September 2023. Relevant portions of audio recordings were extracted using a Praat script, and COVAREP was implemented on the extracted audio files in MATLAB. Ongoing analyses correlating percentage of creak detected and vocal pathology diagnoses will be discussed. Finally, the results will be compared to those of previous work.

This study conducted an acoustic-prosodic mapping analysis of emotional prosody in Mandarin Chinese. It utilized a validated audiometry corpus with 450 disyllabic words. The spoken words covered five basic emotions produced by a female speaker: angry, sad, happy, fearful, and neutral. A machine-learning approach was adopted to map key acoustic-prosodic features for Mandarin emotional vocalization. The results revealed distinctive acoustic profiles for each emotion, highlighting variations in fundamental frequency, intensity, speaking rate, and voice quality. Emotional utterances consistently exhibited higher mean F0 values than neutral expressions. Fear displayed the highest crest in F0. Angry and happy utterances showed greater vocal intensity and a faster speaking rate compared to fearful and sad expressions. While anger was associated with a creaky voice quality, sadness corresponded with a breathier voice quality. The current findings are limited with the use of the single-speaker corpus. Ongoing efforts aim to expand the corpus with more speakers to test the generalizability and scalability of the analysis approach for subsequent investigations.

We investigate utterance-final voice quality in bilinguals of English and Spanish, two languages which differ in the type of non-modal voice usually encountered at ends of utterances: American English often has phrase-final creak, whereas in Mexican Spanish, phrase-final voiced sounds are breathy or even devoiced. Twenty-one bilinguals from the San Diego-Tijuana border region were recorded (with electroglottography and audio) reading passages in English and Spanish. Ends of utterances were coded for their visual voice quality as “modal” (having no aspiration noise or voicing irregularity), “breathy” (having aspiration noise), “creaky” (having voicing irregularity), or “breathy-creaky” (having both aspiration noise and voicing irregularity). In utterance-final position, speakers showed more frequent use of both modal and creaky voice when speaking in English, and more frequent use of breathy and breathy-creaky voice when speaking in Spanish. We find no role of language dominance on the rates of these four voice qualities. The electroglottographic and acoustic analyses show that all voice qualities, even utterance-final creak, are produced with increased glottal spreading; the combination of distinct noise measures and amplitude of voicing can distinguish breathy, creaky, and breathy-creaky voice qualities from one another, and from modal voice.