Creaky voice in L2 English and L1 Dutch

Abstract

While creaky voice is a well-known stylistic-prosodic feature of American English, its use in other languages is under-researched. In Dutch, it has been claimed to be rare and idiosyncratic. Meanwhile, in L2 acquisition studies, creak has been shown to exhibit L1-L2 transfer. We investigate the prevalence of creaky voice and its development over time in young female speakers of L1 Dutch and L2 English, who had previously been shown to converge on L1/L2 segmental features longitudinally. Automatic detection of f0 established individual distributions of creaky and modal phonation. Linear mixed-effects models of relative creak prevalence showed that effects of language (L1 vs L2) and style (read vs spontaneous speech) were limited. Rather, speakers showed similarly high levels of creak in their two languages, and stability over time. The results suggest creak is idiosyncratic, rather than gradually acquired or converged on, but also that it is far from rare in Dutch.