Brown played voice recordings for listeners and asked them to rate the perceived "creakiness" of the sound. Credit: Jeanne Brown

Valleyspeak, uptalk, vocal fry: These are all examples of speech patterns generally assigned to young women and often stereotyped to imply a lack of confidence or intelligence. At least one of these assumed patterns, however, is false.

Jeanne Brown, a researcher at McGill University, presented her work on rethinking vocal fry at the 190th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America , running May 11–15.

Using a combination of acoustic analyses and listener studies, Brown challenges the assumption that vocal fry is a hallmark of young women's speech.

"The narrative took hold in the early 2010s, when a wave of mainstream media articles framed creaky voice—aka vocal fry—as a rising 'affectation' of young women," she said.

By asking listeners to rate voices' creakiness, Brown found that the primary marker for whether a voice sounded creaky was low pitch, not gender.…