Creak Prevalence and Prosodic Context in Australian English

Creaky voice has been found to mark phrase-finality in many varieties of English, as well as in other languages. The present study aims to investigate whether this is also true for Australian English (AusE), a variety that is understudied in creaky voice research. Using automatic creak detection methods, the need for manual annotation of creak is reduced, and we are able to analyse a large dataset of Australian teenagers' speech. As in other varieties, creak is found to be a marker of finality in AusE. Additionally, we find that males use higher rates of creaky voice than females, challenging the widely held assumption that creak is a feature of female speech.