Speaker
Description
Creak is a voice quality frequently occuring in healthy speech, sometimes carrying linguistic or paralinguistic information. Due to the lack of precision in voice control, pathological speakers may produce creak independently from its usual functions. This paper investigates the similarities and differences in temporal characteristics of creak occurences using recordings of German read speech. Based on automatically annotated and manually corrected creak intervals, our results show that pathological speakers creak longer and speak slower than healthy speakers, while the creak rate and the gap between two subsequent creaks remain similar. Analysis shows a loss of correlation between articulation rate and mean creak length as well as articulation rate and creak rate in pathological speech. Furthermore, we find that creak occurs at phrase and sentence boundaries in both groups. The pathological dataset shows a less distinct and more dispersed structure, which suggests reduced targeted voice control and more irregular creak onsets. The study provides new insights into the temporal characteristics of creak in pathological speech and how they reflect impaired voice control.