Money quote:
...listeners judge the female speakers with vocal fry as sounding "untrustworthy", there is a good possibility that they are simply making such a judgment based on the speaker not sounding like herself. The better lesson that one might take home instead here is that one's job prospects are harmed if you try to talk (or act) like someone who you are not.Read the full take-down here (including bonus spectrogram!)
PS: I knew Christian briefly when he was an undergrad at SUNY Buffalo. He was talented and motivated. Now he's slumming it at some shady, slacker *university* in Connecticut. Damn waste.
2 comments:
Well that's a relief. The mainstream coverage of this slanted very heavily in the sexist (but not overly surprising) direction of: "Hey ladies, here's how you're talking WRONG!" I kept thinking there was something off about it.
Good to read that particularly fantastic takedown.
Aelish, within the linguistics community this whole vocal fry thing is generally mocked and derided. Christian re-published his critique at Language Log and received a variety of interesting responses: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=12774
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