The last presentation in this term will be on Monday, April 13, 12-1pm in room 117 and on Zoom (Please use this new zoom link).
Jeanne will be practising her invited talk in the creaky voice special session at ASA 2026.
Topic: Rethinking “young women’s creak”: Piecing together production, perception, and social evidence
Abstract: Since the early 2010s, popular narratives alongside influential academic publications have presented creaky voice as a hallmark of young women’s speech. Drawing primarily on sociophonetic work on Canadian English, this talk integrates acoustic, perceptual, social, and causal-modelling approaches to argue for a more nuanced understanding of creaky voice. Acoustic analyses reveal that men and older speakers exhibit more creak than young women, with fundamental frequency (f0) partially mediating these gender- and age-related differences. A complementary perceptual study shows that listener judgments of creakiness are driven more by acoustic cues such as low f0 than by social cues like perceived female gender, highlighting a divergence between experimental and popular perceptions of creak. I argue that, together with previous work on gender and creak, these results provide little empirical support for the notion that young women are creakier than other speakers—contrary to popular belief. Capturing the complexity of creak requires an integrative approach that considers interactions between acoustic, perceptual, and social factors, rather than treating any single dimension or demographic as explanatory. More broadly, this work challenges widely held sociocultural assumptions about speech patterns and offers directions for future research on voice quality.
All relevant documents (schedules, abstracts, papers and slides/handouts) will be available on this Google Drive.