At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Jeanne Brown will present “Investigating a face-gender effect in creaky voice perception.” We will be meeting this Wednesday, April 9, at 10 AM. Meetings are held in person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics department and on zoom at https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/89609376104.
Abstract: In surveying the vast literature on creaky voice as an indexical feature, a striking production-perception mismatch emerges. Traditionally, creak has been associated with men‘s speech (e.g., Henton & Bladon, 1988, Klatt & Klatt, 1990), often relying on acoustic measures. Since around 2010 however, public discourse has perpetuated opposite gender associations, suggesting increased creaky voice use by women (e.g., Podesva, 2013; Yuasa, 2010), typically implementing perceptual coding of creaky voice. There is no convincing empirical evidence for any change in the acoustics of voice quality over time, but there is substantial evidence for recent change in popular perception of voice quality. The main goal of this project is to reconcile differences between the production and perception of creaky voice by ascertaining how its perception varies as a function of speaker attributes, specifically gender and f0. I will be presenting preliminary results from my perception experiment in which an ambiguously gendered voice, varying in voice quality (creak vs. modal), f0 (115Hz vs. 135 Hz vs. 155Hz), and face gender presented (M vs. F) is rated for perceived level of creak.