Yeah, when I listen to the voices of “Disney princess” characters like Tiana and Lottie, for example, or Merida (who actually is a child, at least no older than mid-teens), I’m not getting a “little girl” vibe.
Old-fashioned Disney princesses like Cinderella can sound a bit “affected” by comparison, but more in a “mid-century Hollywood actress” way than in a “little girl” way, ISTM. (Did Marilyn Monroe have a “little girl” voice, for example?)
Maybe Snow White is what people mean by a “Disney” “little girl” voice.
You’re over thinking it. Women with little girl voices…
I remember her talking about trying to order pizzas, they wanted her to put her parents on the phone. She later took voice lessons to deepen her voice.
No, I can hear how Kathy Ireland’s voice sounds young, for example, but it certainly doesn’t sound to me as though she’s either being “affected” or revealing “some sort of speech defect” (!). Which is what the OP was explicitly asking about.
So unless your example of a voice like Kathy Ireland’s is in fact what the OP was talking about (in which case, wtf? “speech defect”?), then I still don’t understand what the OP was talking about.
Do you think that Kathy Ireland’s voice sounds “affected” or like “some sort of speech defect”?
If it’s an “affectation”, she is not the only one—I once met a girl in California who had the same type of accent and high-pitched voice and everything. I do not know if she was from Santa Barbara. I know many people with high-pitched voices. Not sure how it interacts with your singing voice (vocal weight and range), but that requires training in any case.
I thought someone by now would’ve mentioned the thing some people (used to?) do, where they speak higher, “lighter” and more tentative.
I noticed it in the business world back in the '70s (think Mad Men ad agency). We had a woman who’d always defer to others… in a meeting, her pitch would go up, her voice get softer, and every single sentence would go up at the end and make it sound like a question.
"So… I was… updating the client directory…?"
(pause, as if waiting for permission to continue… during which I was SO tempted to reply “I’m going to guess YES, you WERE updating the client directory.”)
After getting to know her, she told us it was a symptom of a lack of self-confidence. Her boss was overbearing, and she felt that if she took a stand, she’d get shut down.
She got better. Almost forty years later, I visited her and her Significant Other, and now that she owns her own business her voice has dropped an octave. And she can make a statement without it… y’know?.. being a… question?
If I understand correctly, the OP was asking if the cause of the “little girl” voice is some sort of speech defect, a deliberate affectation, or something else altogether.
Yes, which is why I mentioned that I personally don’t think that the one specific example of “little girl voice” that’s been suggested sounds to me either like a deliberate affectation or like evidence of a speech defect.
I think it has to do with the structure (size, thickness) of the vocal chords. You can affect the pitch via breathing and tension, but I do not think she is a basso profondo who is faking it.
I don’t think there is a one-size-fits-all answer to the OP. I think in Kathy Ireland’s case that is/was her natural voice, hence the reason for voice lessons to deepen it. Kathy’s voice was just an example of a grown woman with a little girl voice. She was the first one I thought of when I read the OP.
I’ve known lots of women with very high voices (there were plenty of women with high voices in China for example) and I can’t relate to most of the comments in this thread.
In almost every case it was just their natural voice. It wasn’t done deliberately, and it wasn’t accompanied by childish vocabulary or mannerisms.
I think, maybe, some women go a little up in tone when flirting…that’s my best attempt to relate to the observations of this thread.
Decades ago there was a woman who called the place I worked, with a very notable voice. Her voice was “sexy”. Everyone who spoke with her agreed. It was actually difficult to follow her conversation due to the sultry, breathy nature of her voice.
Eventually someone thought to put her on speakerphone. A crowd would gather anytime she called, and her situation required frequent calls. We each had a mental picture of the woman, mine was Tina Louise (Ginger on Gilligan’s Island).
Eventually her situation required that she visit in person! People who were off that day stopped by to see what she looked like. Turns out she was an elderly woman in a wheelchair with an attached bottle of oxygen. A caregiver wheeled her in. The “breathy” sound and the cadence, etc were all caused by her respiratory problems. Each word she uttered looked like it might be her last, and yet her diction was precise.
It sounds to me like she’s speaking with a higher larynx position, and I notice her tongue seems to be pulled up and back as she speaks. Her vowels seem narrow as well. And this is exactly what a voice actor would do to play a cutesy-voiced character. Heck, it’s also the voice that they tend to give a ditzy type.
On the other hand, it does sound rather natural from her, like this is the way she always speaks. It very much may be her natural accent. However, it’s not one I hear all that much anymore.
None of this is about just speaking with a higher pitch. Of course many women have those. It’s the timbre which seems off to me. Well, that and the prosody–she’s a bit sing-songy with it, too.
It could be structural. Maybe her laryngeal space is just smaller than average. But if that was the cause, I’d think I’d hear it a lot more often, and it wouldn’t be so easy for other people to do as an impression.
There certainly is in some cases. I’ve known women who used that girlish voice whenever men were in hearing, but a lower pitched voice when only women were around.
For some women, however, that’s their normal voice; so I try not to jump to conclusions.
