A cross-generational investigation of voice quality in women
Date
2014-09
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
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Publisher
University of Calgary
Abstract
This research investigates the use of creaky voice by university-aged women and their mothers in order to answer three main questions: i. is there a specific phonetic environment where this voice quality is more likely to occur, ii. do young women use this voice quality more frequently than older women?, and iii. is creaky voice a register marker? Five mother-daughter pairs were used to help control for social and geographical dialect variation. Participants engaged in five tasks designed to compare the speech patterns of university-aged women and their mothers in different registers. A difference is hypothesized to be found in, both, the use of creaky voice cross-generationally, and between registers. Each participant read i. the Rainbow Passage, ii. a set of Harvard Sentences, and iii. a word list. These tasks were designed to provide an idea of the distribution of creaky voice in a formal discourse situation. Tasks iv. and v. are conversation tasks consisting of: a spot-the-differences picture task, and a route finding map task. These conversation tasks simulate a less formal discourse context. Annotations of the recordings were made which marked both the syllabic context in which creaky voice was produced and the length of time it was sustained at each occurrence. Using these annotations, global measurements of the usage of creaky voice were taken for each participant and compared across generations, registers and phonetic environments.
Description
Keywords
Linguistics, Phonology, Phonetics, Speech
Citation
Greer, S. D. F., & Winters, S. J. (2014). A cross-generational investigation of voice quality in women. Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics, 28(Fall), 24-48.