ISCA Archive Interspeech 2023
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2023

Creak Prevalence and Prosodic Context in Australian English

Hannah White, Joshua Penney, Andy Gibson, Anita Szakay, Felicity Cox

Creaky voice has been found to mark phrase-finality in many varieties of English, as well as in other languages. The present study aims to investigate whether this is also true for Australian English (AusE), a variety that is understudied in creaky voice research. Using automatic creak detection methods, the need for manual annotation of creak is reduced, and we are able to analyse a large dataset of Australian teenagers' speech. As in other varieties, creak is found to be a marker of finality in AusE. Additionally, we find that males use higher rates of creaky voice than females, challenging the widely held assumption that creak is a feature of female speech.