Sociolinguistic Artifacts

This video clip shows Lake Bell on Conan O’Brien’s talk show. While discussing her upcoming movie, Bell goes into discussion about her annoyance with what she calls “sexy baby vocal virus” and vocal fry. Lake demonstrates what she means by each of these, as well as explains what they are. Both pitch and vocal fry are the main features of these vocal habits. Bell also makes a gender specific claim, that it is women who fall into this habit of speech. Also, during the clip, while talking about her new movie about voice overs, both Bell and O’Brien style-shift between voices and different ways of speaking, representing performativity.