At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Jeanne Brown will be presenting Creaky voice across language, gender and age in Canadian English-French bilinguals’ speech.

When:
Tuesday, March 12, 15:00–16:00 (Montréal time, UTC-5)
Where:
MCQLL meetings this semester are in hybrid format. We will meet in-person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics Department, 1085 Dr-Penfield. If you’d like to attend virtually, the Zoom link is here.

All are welcome to attend.

  • Speaker:
    Jeanne Brown
    Title:
    Creaky voice across language, gender and age in Canadian English-French bilinguals’ speech
    Abstract:

    Creaky voice (a.k.a vocal fry) is a particular voice quality often characterized by low pitch, irregular vocal pulses, decreased transglottal airflow. This project’s objectives are to investigate the use of creaky voice across languages (English and French) and as a sociolinguistic marker (as a function of gender and age). I will be presenting ongoing work for my Eval 1 paper, focusing on corpus creation and current results. Data treatment features a (almost) entirely automated pipeline, implementing state-of-the-art open-source tools for speech analysis, effectively processing raw .wav files of spontaneous speech into force aligned audio and textgrids ready for acoustic analyses. Preliminary results show that men’s vowels are unequivocally creakier, indicated by more unreliable pitch tracks, lower H1-H2, lower CPP and HNR05 as well as more jitter and shimmer. As for age, CPP, HNR05 and jitter values indicate less creak as YOB increases (i.e. younger speakers are less creaky) and other acoustic measures show no significant differences for YOB. Results do not show strong nor consistent evidence for cross-linguistic differences in creak.