Creaky Voice and Prosodic Boundaries in Spanish: An Acoustic Study

Abstract

This study investigates vocalic creak in connection to the demarcation of prosodic boundaries in Spanish. Data from a picture task from 10 native Spanish speakers from diverse dialects was examined word-medially and word-finally. A total of 800 vowels were analyzed acoustically to determine if they involved creak; duration of creak relative to vowel duration was also recorded. The role of prosodic context, vowel quality and gender were examined. Our results show that creak is one of the cues that signals the end of prosodic constituents, particularly at higher prosodic levels: it averages 64% of realizations word-finally, but only 4% medially; and it is more pervasive in higher prosodic domains. Creak is more likely in males than females (80 vs. 53%), and vowel quality has no effect on creak word-finally, although word-medially /a/ is more frequently creaked than other vowels. We discuss the implications of our results in comparison with previous studies on creaky voice in Spanish and English, in particular Garellek, Marc & Patricia Keating. 2015. Phrase-final creak: Articulation, acoustics, and distribution. In Paper presented at the 89th meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Portland, Oregon, 8–11 January, which report a higher rate of creak for Mexican Spanish females compared to males utterance-finally, and Kim, Ji Young. 2017. Voice quality transfer in the production of Spanish heritage speakers and English L2 learners of Spanish. Silvia Perpiñán. In David Heap, Itziri Moreno-Villamar & Adriana Soto-Corominas (eds.), Selected papers from the 44th linguistic symposium on romance languages (LSRL), 191–207. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, which found creaky voice utterance-finally in L2 Spanish and heritage Spanish speakers, but not in L1 Spanish participants.

Phonation Patterns in Spanish Vowels: Spectral and Spectrographic Analysis

“…Specifically, creaky voice was coded when one or more of the following acoustic cues was present: aperiodicity (non-regular duration of pulses), creak (gradual pulse widening with F0 lowering and damping), diplophonia (variable pulse amplitude or shape), glottal squeak (sudden F0 increase), or the presence of a glottal stop. González et al (2022) found a prevalence of creaky voice word-finally for vowels across several Spanish dialects, particularly for men, and at the end of higher prosodic constituents. The data were originally examined for creaky voice only, but further inspection showed that at least some of the vowels coded as creaky tended to end in a noisy and/or non-periodic interval which could be consistent with breathy voice and/or devoicing.…”

“…In a previous study, González et al (2022) examined the occurrence of creaky voice in word-final Spanish vowels. Creaky voice was analyzed via visual inspection of waveforms and spectrograms, following Dilley et al (1996), Redi and Shattuck-Hufnagel (2001) and Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996).…”

Utterance-Final Voice Quality in American English and Mexican Spanish Bilinguals

“…Creak, though commonly discussed in English, is also increasingly found in Spanish. For example, González et al (2022) analyzed the occurrence of creaky voice in 10 speakers from a variety of Spanish-speaking countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Peru, Puerto Rico, Spain, and Venezuela), and found that creaky voice was pervasive in word-final position. They also found that creak was more common among men than women, and with low vowels.…”

“…Phrase-final creak refers to ends of phrases, especially utterances (Redi and Shattuck-Hufnagel 2001), that are produced with creaky voice or with creak so irregular that the "quasi-"periodic vibration assumed for voicing is called into question. Phrase-final creak is common across varieties of English, but is also attested in other languages, including Spanish (Garellek 2022;González et al 2022).…”

Creaky Voice in Chilean Spanish: A Tool for Organizing Discourse and Invoking Alignment

“…Each DU could have up to three primary and secondary purposes, and the authors determined that two broad categories of sharing feelings and evaluations and of conveying information accounted for over 80% of the general communicative purposes. This approach is similar in some ways to Goffman's (1974) notion of frame, which delineates how an individual categorizes or makes sense of their social interactions. However, in my view, Biber et al (2021) offer a more clearly defined, empirically verified approach for determining the communicative purposes of discourse units within informal conversation.…”