Vocal fry: Your creaky throat noises are now an actual scientific trend

Vocal fry, a low, staccato grumbling once thought to be a speech impediment, is now emerging as a common vocal pattern among women speaking American English.

A recent study from Long Island University (LIU) in Brookville, New York — the first to quantify vocal fry’s occurrence in regular speaking — found the pattern evident in more than two-thirds of college-age female subjects who were asked to submit speech samples, Science magazine reports. The subjects’ vocal fry was deemed normal, though, because they often only incorporated it into their speech at the end of their sentences, and not during sustained vowel tests, which could signal a disorder.

"There are languages that use creak as part of the phonemic system," says Patricia Keating, a linguist at the University of California, Los Angeles. "The chances of it leading to vocal damage are very minimal."



The trend has become especially prevalent in mainstream radio, with artists like Britney Spears relying on vocal fry — the lowest of the three voice registers — to reach very low notes in songs. It seems as though this is generational phenomenon, though. Co-author and speech scientist Nassima Abdelli-Beruh of LIU found that NPR, which skews to an older audience, does not contain vocal fry.

The researchers also found that the trend is more prevalent among American English-speaking women than their male counterparts; however, in British English, it is more prevalent among men.

Though the new data is specific to a small geographic area, the researchers think that the trend exists across the U.S., albeit not across age groups. Their next step is to determine how this trend started, and if it has a social purpose.

"Young students tend to use it when they get together," Abdelli-Beruh says. "Maybe this is a social link between members of a group."



The original Science magazine article is here.