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'Vocal Fry' Creeping Into US Speech
sciencehabit writes "A curious vocal pattern has crept into the speech of young adult women who speak American English: low, creaky vibrations, also called vocal fry. Pop singers, such as Britney Spears, slip vocal fry into their music as a way to reach low notes and add style. Now, a new study of young women in New York state shows that the same guttural vibration — once considered a speech disorder — has become a language fad."
As for the backgrounds of the students they do not provide a geographical range in the article. It is not in the abstract of the paper either. Without reading the paper it is not clear what kind of backgrounds the students came from. If they all came from the same college then that is a bigger issue than the sample size and is clearly not a "random sample."
Believe it or not, there is an entire field of study called "statistics" that can be used to assess whether a difference of a certain magnitude is real given a sample of a certain size. And, as a phonetician myself, I can tell you that performing these kinds of measurements on speech recordings in a rigorous, controlled, and reproducible way can take a fair amount of time. Finally, they probably did run more than 34 subjects, but had to throw out various subjects who were not native speakers or were male or so on (often, experimenters are not allowed to discriminate on these grounds when advertising for subjects)
>You don't really hear that much anymore.
You obviously do not live in a predominately college town. Here in Blacksburg we have a permanent population of around 15,000 and a student population of 35,000. For nine months out of the year, I marvel at how Frank Zappa has pulled off the longest troll in the history of music -- spreading that god-awful dialect all the way out East so that even 30 years after the song, I'm surrounded by what started as an attempt of a daughter to cozy up to her dad by making fun of stupid people from Encino.
If the girls talk like airheads, then the guys here talk like wanna-be thugs. Even at an engineering school, I am subjected daily to "Yeah, but uh, y'know I was like... whaaaaaaat?" But that's a whole other topic. First, let's get rid of the word "like". I am convinced that this generation is so disaffected and removed from everything that nothing is real to them anymore. They don't want a cup of coffee; they ask "can I just get like, a cup of coffee?" They didn't go see the movie 3 times, they saw it "like, 3 times". Nothing is real or concrete to them.
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
If the girls talk like airheads, then the guys here talk like wanna-be thugs. Even at an engineering school, I am subjected daily to "Yeah, but uh, y'know I was like... whaaaaaaat?" But that's a whole other topic. First, let's get rid of the word "like". I am convinced that this generation is so disaffected and removed from everything that nothing is real to them anymore. They don't want a cup of coffee; they ask "can I just get like, a cup of coffee?" They didn't go see the movie 3 times, they saw it "like, 3 times". Nothing is real or concrete to them.
This is not what you think it does. In this context 'like' is being used as a 'filler'. The 'filler like' itself has no meaning, but in a place holder for a pause. Similar to other 'words' such as 'uh' or 'hmm' or 'er'. It does not mean necessarily 'nearly' or 'almost' - although it could mean that too, it depends on context.
[Citation needed]
OK, here (O'Conner and Kellerman ) you go.
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Works Cited
O'Conner, Patricia T., and Stewart Kellerman. Origins Of The Specious, Myths And Misconceptions Of The English Language. Random House Inc, 2009.
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