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In linguistics, creaky voice (sometimes called laryngealisation, pulse phonation, vocal fry, or glottal fry) is a special kind of phonation in which the arytenoid cartilages in the larynx are drawn together; as a result, the vocal folds are compressed rather tightly, becoming relatively slack and compact. They normally vibrate irregularly at 20–50 pulses per second, about two octaves below the frequency of modal voicing, and the airflow through the glottis is very slow. Although creaky voice may occur with very low pitch, as at the end of a long intonation unit, it can also occur with a higher pitch.

In phonology

In the Received Pronunciation of English, creaky voice has been described as a possible realisation of glottal reinforcement. For example, an alternative phonetic transcription of attempt could be .

In some languages, such as Jalapa Mazatec, creaky voice has a phonemic status; that is, the presence or absence of creaky voice can change the meaning of a word. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, creaky voice of a phone is represented by a diacritical tilde U+0330  ̰ COMBINING TILDE BELOW, for example . The Danish prosodic feature stød is an example of a form of laryngealisation that has a phonemic function. A slight degree of laryngealisation, occurring in some Korean consonants for example, is called "stiff voice".

Social aspects

Researcher Ikuko Patricia Yuasa found that "college-age Americans ... perceive female creaky voice as hesitant, nonaggressive, and informal but also educated, urban-oriented, and upwardly mobile." However, according to a 2012 study in PLOS ONE, young women using creaky voice are viewed as less competent, less educated, less trustworthy, less attractive and less employable. creaky voice is characterised as a speech pathology or voluntary vocal affectation, noting that its use as a “fashion trend” can be off-putting and damage the professional image of young women. Some suggest that creaky voice can function as a marker of parentheticals in conversations; utterance of certain phrases in creaky voice may suggest that they carry less important information.

It is subsequently theorized that creaky voice may be a way for women to sound more "authoritative" and credible; Pennock-Speck finds that creaky voice is often seen as sexually desirable in American culture. Henton & Bladen (1988) suggest there may be biological reasons as to why women produce creaky voice more than men. They find that creaky voice may be easier for female speakers to produce because they have shorter vocal cords than males, making the bunching of their vocal cords easier. Yuasa further theorizes that because California is at the center of American popular culture and much of the entertainment industry is rooted there, young Americans may unconsciously be using creaky voice more because of the media they consume. She concludes that further research is needed in analyzing creaky voice in other regions of the country.

Another potential reason young women are the highest demographic to be speaking with creaky voice is rooted in "conversational entrainment". Borrie & Delfino (2017) analyze "conversational entrainment", or the natural inclination people have to modulate their voices to match their conversational mate. They hypothesize that participants in their study will use creaky voice more when engaging with a partner who frequently uses creaky voice, as opposed to someone using creaky voice minimally. They further posit that the more entrainment occurs, the more successful the conversation will be in both efficiency and enjoyment. To test these hypotheses, they gave two participants different pictures and asked them to work together to find the ten small differences between their images. One conversational partner spoke with vocal fry often, while the other conversational partner did not speak it much. They found that the more participants attempted to mirror their conversational partner in vocal fry, the better the participants were able to communicate successfully. Further, vocal fry entrainment led to greater likeability between the partners.

See also

• Creaky-voiced glottal approximant
• Vocal fry register

References

1. Titze, I. R. (2008). "The Human Instrument". Scientific American. 298 (1): 94–101. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0108-94. PMID 18225701.
2. Titze, I. R. (1994). Principles of Voice Production. Prentice Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-717893-3.
3. Roach, Peter (2004). British English: Received Pronunciation (PDF). Vol. 34. p. 241. doi:10.1017/S0025100304001768. {{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help)
4. Ashby, M.; Maidment, J. A. (2005). Introducing Phonetic Science. Cambridge University Press. p. 98. ISBN 978-0-521-00496-1. Retrieved 2012-06-30.
5. Basbøll, Hans (2005). The Phonology of Danish. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-824268-0. P. 24: "The Danish stød is a syllable prosody manifested by laryngealization."
6. Ahn, Sang-cheol; Iverson, Gregory K. (October 2004). "Dimensions in Korean Laryngeal Phonology*". Journal of East Asian Linguistics. 13 (4): 345–379. doi:10.1007/s10831-004-4256-x. ISSN 0925-8558.
7. ^ Yuasa, I. P. (2010). "Creaky Voice: A New Feminine Voice Quality for Young Urban-Oriented Upwardly Mobile American Women?". American Speech. 85 (3): 315–337. doi:10.1215/00031283-2010-018.
8. Anderson, Rindy C., et al. "Vocal Fry May Undermine the Success of Young Women in the Labor Market", PLOS ONE, 28 May 2014. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0097506
9. Lee, Sinae (2015-06-01). "Creaky voice as a phonational device marking parenthetical segments in talk". Journal of Sociolinguistics. 19 (3): 275–302. doi:10.1111/josl.12123. ISSN 1467-9841.
10. Dilley, L.; Shattuck-Hufnagel, S; Ostendorf, M. (1996). "Glottalization of word-initial vowels as a function of prosodic structure 1996" (PDF). Journal of Phonetics (24): 423–444.
11. Coates 1986
12. Hollien, Moore, Wendahl, & Michel 1966
13. Borkowska & Pawlowski 2010
14. Pennock-Speck 2005
15. Henton & Bladen (1988)
16. Borrie & Delfino (2017)

Further reading

• Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-19815-6.
• "Word of Mouth: Young Women as Linguistic Innovators", BBC Radio 4, 18 May 2015, from c. 17:40 mins.

• Phonation