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'Vocal Fry' Creeping Into US Speech

Posted by timothy on from the how-totally-bizarre dept.

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."

2 of 331 comments (clear)

  1. Re:"Study of 34 female speakers" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    With 34 subjects the error in the confidence interval for the proportion is roughly +/- 0.17. They had about 2/3 of their subjects use this vocal pattern. Seems like they can claim that the lower bound is 49% which may be all they needed to make their point. Plus they had to have two speech experts evaluate each sample. It may not be so easy to just sit and listen for a couple of minutes to make a consistent decision as to whether or not the subjects were regularly using this vocal pattern in their speech habits.

    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."

  2. Re:This too shall pass. by wasme · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.