There has been a great deal of recent interest in vocal fry, both in production and perception. However, much of the scientific literature that has used naturally produced fry has focused on speech elicited through reading, rather than spontaneous speech. The current study compares reading with spontaneous speech elicited in various ways for both male and female speakers, recorded in dyads. The speakers were asked to teach their partner information, give instructions, and describe their qualifications for a scholarship, with reading controls for each task. Surprisingly, we found more vocal fry (in both proportion of words and words/duration) for men than women. Men differed in the amount of fry across task types. Interactions of speaker sex, task type, and fry were examined for measures of F0, pitch range, intensity level, jitter, shimmer, and HNR. Listener perceptions of speech with and without vocal fry were also obtained. Task type affected listener perceptions of speech with vocal fry. Vocal fry in spontaneously produced speech seems to differ from fry in speech produced during reading, in quantity, acoustics, and listener perceptions. Additionally, acoustic measures suggest that vocal fry may be intimately tied to decreased vocal effort across task types and speaker sex.

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Vocal fry, used frequently by both men and women, is often associated with negative stereotypes of young women. This study examines how different ways of eliciting vocal fry affects acoustic properties as well as listener perceptions of speech. Stimuli in previous studies have been obtained from actors who were presented with obvious examples of fry from media sources and were then instructed to produce speech with vocal fry. This method of eliciting fry may introduce other vocal characteristics that activate stereotypes. We obtained natural stimuli by asking speakers to read passages with no instructions about vocal fry and created a corpus of acoustic and prosodic data about naturalistic fry. We then recorded actors who listened to naturally-produced examples of vocal fry. We compared the acoustic characteristics of low and high fry speech from our naturally-produced utterances, our actors, and stimuli collected by Anderson et al. (2014). Elicited fry (from both studies) differed when compared to naturally-produced fry. Additionally, elicited fry in our study differed from that of Anderson et al on jitter and other measures. The three sets of stimuli were used to replicate and extend Anderson and colleagues’ study on listener perceptions of men and women using vocal fry.