Related Concept Videos
Non-Verbal Cues
Facial Feedback Hypothesis
Perceiving Loudness, Pitch, and Location
Place theory, or place coding, suggests that different pitches are heard because various sound waves activate specific locations along the cochlea's basilar membrane. The brain determines the pitch of a sound by...
Language and Cognition
Impression Management Techniques IV: Altercasting
Language Development
The critical period for language acquisition suggests that the ability to acquire language is at its peak early in life. As people age, this proficiency decreases. Language development begins very...
You might also read
Related Articles
Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.
Learning or Boredom? Task Adaptation Effects in Sentence Processing Experiments.
Effects of mobility on dialect change: Introducing the linguistic mobility index.
The Keys to the Future? An Examination of Statistical Versus Discriminative Accounts of Serial Pattern Learning.
Related Experiment Video
Updated: Nov 12, 2025

Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
Published on: September 27, 2024
Using Crowd-Sourced Speech Data to Study Socially Constrained Variation in Nonmodal Phonation.
Ben Gittelson1, Adrian Leemann2, Fabian Tomaschek3
1Internet Institute, Oxford University, Oxford, United Kingdom.
This study analyzed nonmodal phonation in British English using smartphone recordings. Researchers discovered a link between education and voice production, confirming previous findings on gender differences in creaky voice.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Phonetics
- Sociolinguistics
Background:
- Nonmodal phonation, including breathy and creaky voice, is a key area in phonetic research.
- Previous studies on nonmodal phonation have often relied on smaller, less diverse datasets.
- Understanding variations in nonmodal phonation is crucial for comprehensive phonetic analysis.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the prevalence and characteristics of nonmodal phonation in British English.
- To explore potential correlations between nonmodal phonation and sociodemographic factors, such as education level.
- To validate the use of novel data collection methods, like smartphone recordings, for large-scale phonetic studies.
Main Methods:
- Utilized smartphone recordings from over 2,500 British English speakers.
- Analyzed acoustic correlates including fundamental frequency, H1*-H2*, cepstral peak prominence, and harmonic-to-noise ratio.
- Employed crowd-sourced data collection for a large and diverse sample.
Main Results:
- Identified a novel relationship between speakers' education level and their production of nonmodal phonation.
- Confirmed previous findings on the higher prevalence of creaky voice in male speakers compared to female speakers.
- Demonstrated that established patterns of nonmodal phonation hold true for a significantly larger and more diverse population.
Conclusions:
- Smartphone recordings offer a viable and effective method for collecting large-scale phonetic data.
- Sociodemographic factors, such as education, play a role in the production of nonmodal phonation.
- The study validates and extends previous research on nonmodal phonation, reinforcing its findings with a robust dataset.

