Physical task stress affects the coordination between breathing and speaking, and vocal pitch, intensity, and pause structure are all sensitive to changes in breathing and effort. Pitch and intensity both increase, while intensity also becomes less stable and speech rate slows down. Understanding exactly how physical stress causes changes to vocal patterns can help train speech recognition systems, which often struggle with speech that differs from the average. Zahra Omidi will present her work on this as part of the 190th ASA Meeting.

Using a combination of acoustic analyses and listener studies, Jeanne Brown challenges the assumption that vocal fry is a hallmark of young women’s speech. By asking listeners to rate voices’ creakiness, she found that the primary marker for whether a voice sounded creaky was low pitch, not gender. In fact, men and older speakers exhibit more creak than young women, a massive disconnect between evidence and popular belief. Brown will present her work on rethinking vocal fry as part of the 190th ASA Meeting.

A new study published in the journal People and Nature reveals a significant gap in public awareness regarding one of the world’s most widespread invasive species: the freshwater jellyfish Craspedacusta sowerbii. Despite being present on six continents and well-documented by scientists in Europe, this unnoticed invader remains largely unknown to the public, a factor that researchers say may be hindering the development of early warning systems and effective environmental policy. To assess how the public perceives this invasion, an international team of researchers conducted a multilingual survey across 17 European countries.