Modal Register, Vocal Fry, and Uptalk: Identification and Perceptual Judgments of Inexperienced Listeners.

Objectives: The purpose of this study is to identify the accuracy with which graduate students in a department of communication sciences and disorders identify modal register, vocal fry, and uptalk presented in audio samples of female celebrity speakers, and to report these listeners' perceptual responses to a variety of attributes (eg, trustworthy, competent, educated).

Study Design: This investigation was an anonymous online survey study.

Methods: As part of an anonymous online survey, graduate students in a department of communicative sciences and disorders listened to training modules and then classified female voice samples according to the three features under investigation (ie, modal register, vocal fry, and uptalk). The listeners then appraised a variety of speaker attributes, including physical attractiveness, trustworthiness, competence, and level of education, based on the audio samples of connected speech.

Results: The participants labeled voice samples of vocal fry with 85% accuracy, uptalk at 79% accuracy, and modal register only 51% of the time. Cohen's Kappa showed substantial agreement between the repeated ratings of modal register and a moderate agreement for repeated ratings of samples of vocal fry and uptalk. A Pearson analysis revealed a strong positive correlation between the modal register samples and positive attributes, including the appeal of the voice, trustworthiness, competence, and level of education, but yielded negative correlations for vocal fry and uptalk with the same traits. The listeners assigned negative attributes (eg, untrustworthy, unappealing voice) to the samples of vocal fry and uptalk.

Conclusions: Training notwithstanding, the listeners had difficulty accurately identifying modal register despite their frequent exposure to that manner of phonation. They did, however, with a high level of accuracy, identify vocal fry and uptalk and were similar in their judgment of attributes to those vocal features. The listeners' responses revealed similar negative assumptions associated with vocal fry and uptalk and positive assessments of modal register. Our results raise questions rather than conclusions. If, as has been shown in previous studies, female speakers often speak in vocal fry and uptalk, why are their responses to those vocal features so negative? Are the cultural, sociolinguistic, and peer pressures so powerful that they override the individual's judgment?