By Glenn McDonald, Discovery News

In the realm of baseball broadcasting, maybe the single most famous call in the history of the game happened on Oct. 3, 1951, when New York Giants outfielder Bobby Thompson hit a game-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth inning against the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Known as "The Shot Heard 'Round the World," the home run capped a historic comeback by Giants over their longtime rivals and inspired the famous radio call by Giants broadcaster Russ Hodges:

"There's a long drive … it's gonna be, I believe … The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!"

Baseball fans have long appreciated that announcers like Hodges in "the good old days" -- the era of the 1950s and before -- have a very specific style and cadence to their speech. It's a clipped, carefully enunciated manner of speaking that can also be heard in the films, TV shows and newsreels of the day.

But did everyone really talk like that in the 1950s? Or is that mannered speaking style we're familiar with really a pop cultural construct -- an artifact of the performance styles and broadcaster techniques of the time?

"That tinny, clipped tone of yesteryear is called Transatlantic speech," said Jay O'Berski, assistant professor of the Practice of Theater Studies with Duke University.

Transatlantic is a specific style of speaking, or dialect, that is still taught in acting schools and was part of the curriculum for performers and broadcasters in the early days of mass media. "It's an effort to neutralize regional dialects and consciousness of a particular class," O'Berski said.

That high-end, nasally quality, also associated with speech from previous eras, is a very real phenomenon, although it may have more to do with technology than performance technique.

"My understanding of the high-end, all-treble sound is that it's a holdover from radio and the first talkies when they had very little bass technology in receivers," O'Berski said. "You literally could not hear bass tones before stereo technology."

So what we think of in popular culture as "that 1950s" voice is partially the result of performance techniques and technology of the day. The artifacts we have from that era are, to a large degree, recordings of professional performers and broadcasters – film and TV actors, news readers and sports announcers.

But if you were to stop a random person on the street in 1955, in a random town in America, you'd get the full spectrum of regional dialects that continues to change and evolve to this day, says Dr. Robert Leonard, Director of the Institute for Forensic Linguistics at Hofstra University in New York.

Proof of this is just a few clicks away in the age of YouTube and archived, digitized video, Leonard says. "It is quite possible to find 'man-in-the-street' interviews from 50 years ago. Unless these are staged, and it should be pretty obvious, you will be hearing the 'real' dialects of the times."

Sportswriter Jason Turbow, author of the 2010 book "The Baseball Codes," recently finished work on his latest project -- "Baseball Forever!," a compilation of game broadcasts from the Golden Age of radio. Turbow says recordings from that era can illustrate the range of speaking styles in the era -- often in a single exchange of dialogue up in the press box.

"The play-by-play guys are usually professional broadcasters, and you can hear the difference right away between them and the color (commentary) guys, who are often ex-ballplayers or managers," Turbow said. "It's the same as today, really."

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When Access Hollywood interviewed 104-year-old Edythe Kirchmaier, we were impressed by her vigor and dedication to Direct Relief International, but we also noticed something else. Kirchmaier, who seems young and vibrant despite her age, had a wavering, breathy voice. This caused us to wonder: What happens to our voices as we age?

“Voice can depend on general health. In general, we start seeing aging problems at age 65,” says Claudio Milstein, associate professor of surgery at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine. “The typical change as we get older, is that we get thin, breathy voices … [and] those are the characteristics that make it sound like a person has an old voice.”

Evidence confirms that voices do change with age. The vocal chords should vibrate between 90 and 230 times per minute, with young people experiencing the most movement and older people experiencing the least, explains Amee Shah, associate professor and director of the Research Laboratory in Speech Acoustics and Perception at Cleveland State University.

“In my lab we look at acoustic data because perception can be misleading and the hard numbers confirm it. It is true that as we age our voices change,” says Shah.

When we age our vocal chords weaken and become drier. Our respiratory systems and torsos change, too, with our lungs and chest cavities becoming more rigid, while our spines curve, causing us to stoop over (for some a little, others a lot). Weakened and dry vocal chords become stringy, which prevent normal vibration, causing higher pitched voices that sound thin. And the transformations in the respiratory system and chest mean we have less power behind our voices. Even the joints in our vocal chords can become arthritic, contributing to problems. 

“The vocal folds are made up of muscle and collagen among other things. Just like other muscles thin out or atrophy, the vocal folds do as well,” says Gina Vess, a speech pathologist and director of the Clinical Voice Programs at Duke University Medical Center.

Not everyone suffers from wavering voices as they age. People who are physically and socially active possess stronger voices and those who sing maintain robust voices throughout their lives. 

People who suffer from weakened, breathy voices often become ashamed of how they sound and cringe when asked to repeat themselves over and over. These people then avoid socialization, leading to less vocal exercising. And, they feel more isolated, which leads to depression and a lessened quality of life. 

“It doesn’t mean there is no hope if they notice a weakening. A lot of times nonsurgical treatments [improve voices],” says Vess.

Those suffering from wavering voices should visit an ear, noses, and throat doctor and seek help at a voice clinic. Experts recommend speech therapy first, with more serious treatments such as injections or surgery if therapy fails.  

“Voices carry something about the emotional state and health of the body,” says Milstein. “There are a lot of things we can do to rejuvenate a voice even though it may be part of the normal aging process.”

Related:

Why 'Idol' contestant's stutter goes away when he sings

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Even as millions tune in to the next round of auditions on “American Idol,” they aren’t likely to forget Lazaro Arbos, one of last week’s stand-out contestants whose voice visibly stunned the judges.

Arbos stuttered while introducing himself and the song he was set to sing, but once he broke into “Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” the stammering was gone. The performance won him four “yes” votes from the panel and a spot in the next round in Hollywood. 

But it also left many people wondering why a person may stutter while speaking but not while singing. 

Speech pathologists say there is not yet a scientifically proven answer to that question, but there are likely a number of physiologic, genetic, environmental and social variables that play a role.

One plausible explanation, said Krzysztof Izdebski, chairman of the Pacific Voice and Speech Foundation in San Francisco, is that singing relies mostly on memory.

“When you speak, on the other hand, it’s more of a voluntary activity. There’s planning, thinking, reaction, et cetera. Singing requires different mechanisms,” he said. People who stutter may be unable to coordinate all the movements and processes involved in speech, he explained.

“The more automatic the speech is, the less someone is likely to stutter,” added Karin Wexler, an adjunct associate professor of speech and language pathology at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York.  “The same goes for reciting a poem.  There’s no real communication involved.”

After the stirring performance, “Idol” judges Keith Urban and Randy Jackson told Arbos that he should just “sing all the time.” But according to the Stuttering Project at the University of Iowa, while people who stutter may be able to sing stutter-free, singing will “rarely produce long-term fluency.”

Wexler also explained that speaking requires the voice box to work a lot more because there is repeated starting and stopping, unlike singing, which is a more continuous flow. 

“Getting the voice started can be a problem for someone who stutters,” she said. 

The enigmatic phenomenon could also be due to the differences in brain activity elicited by singing and speaking. Each is associated with a different part of the brain, and perhaps the musical signals get routed differently, according to Izdebski.

And it’s not just stammering that gets lost when some people break into song. Accents tend to disappear as well.

“Singing is never spontaneous.  People learn a song and will sing it as they heard it,” said Izdebski. 

In fact, speaking with a different accent actually seems to help some stutterers.

“If they are speaking in a different way from their ordinary way of speaking, they may become more fluent,” said Wexler.   

It’s too early to tell whether Arbos will win it all, but the Stuttering Foundation of America already considers him an American idol.

Said the foundation in a press release, “For his courage to speak and perform on one of the most-watched shows on television in America, Lazaro Arbos is already a winner to the stuttering community.” 

Related:

Singer silences his stutter with song on 'American Idol'

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BUT THIS IS MY INSIDE VOICE!!

If there were a "Saturday Night Live" skit that sums up Kevin Roberts' life, it would have to be The Loud Family.

"My family is full of loud talkers," says the 42-year-old author and educational consultant from Detroit. He jokes, "My mother sneezes so loudly that children in the neighborhood congregate around the house waiting for one.

"I do a lot of public speaking and don't use a microphone, even if I'm talking to 400 people. And whenever I get together with my brother, we're out of hand. Everybody shushes us. We just have booming voices."

Roberts' sister, on the other hand, has her volume set to low.

"My older sister compensates," he says. "She has a first grade subdued teacher voice. She's more of a soft talker."

While loud talkers and soft talkers may seem like the stuff of "Seinfeld," researchers have actually pinpointed why some of us are constantly shushed while others struggle to be heard.

"There are four different factors," says Dr. Amee Shah, director of the speech acoustics and perception laboratory at Cleveland State University. "There's a biological component, a pathological component, a personality component and a cultural component."

Sometimes, loud or soft voices are simply based on the way we're built, Shah explains.

"It can be mechanical," she says. "Everybody is born with a different size larynx and vocal cords within that. Also, some may have smaller lungs and can't generate enough airflow to have a louder voice."

Pathologically speaking, the volume of a person's voice can be due to changes in the tissue or vibration rate of the vocal cords.

"As we age, our tissue atrophies," says Shah. "The vocal cords don't vibrate as fast. Or there could be other things, such as the person is a lifelong smoker or they have vocal nodules or polyps. All those things can contribute to a softer voice."

Personality can play a part in the loud voice-soft voice smackdown, as well (just check out the difference between the "Super Bass" singing cousins Sophia Grace and Rosie in this viral video).

"Some people may be shy and withdrawn and inhibited," says Shah. "They may not be comfortable in a social situation, they may not be a good speaker. This is where some of the examples from 'Seinfeld' come in -- the low talkers or the people who like to mumble. Psychologically, they're not able to project their voices loud enough."

Even culture can affect how loudly (or softly) we talk, says Shah.

"Certain cultures prevent or inhibit loud talking, especially if you're a woman," she says. "There are pragmatic reasons why someone may not make direct eye contact and not project their voice loud enough."

As to whether loud talking is genetic, Shah says it's more about environment.

"At the family level, it's more of a mental influence," she says. "If it's a large family, everybody learns that to be heard, you have to speak up. It's more sociological."

But growing up around a bunch of loud talkers can have the opposite effect, she says, as with Roberts' soft-talking sister.

"Sometimes, if a father or older brother is louder, a sibling might tend to be more withdrawn," she says.

There is good news for soft talkers longing to be heard, though, says Shah.  

"You can definitely train yourself to talk louder," she says, pointing to various methods such as using the respiratory control more efficiently, learning to work your optimal pitch so you're not wasting air flow, taking deeper breaths, hydrating yourself more often, and doing yoga.

"All of these give you more projection," she says.

As for talking softer, Shah says that's much more difficult.

"Most of the time, people aren't aware they're doing it," she says. "They may not think they're loud unless somebody tells them. A lot of the time, people focus on content and don't think about delivery."

Are you naturally quiet -- or does your voice seem to be permanently set at the highest possible volume? Got any theories why you're that way? 

Related:

• Teen has tongue surgery to speak Korean. Huh?!
• 'Allo, guvnah! Mimicking accents may be innate
• Pahking the cah? Regional accents getting stronger

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Alyssa Kramer can say any word backward.

Assyla Remark nac yas yna drow drawkcacb.

The 14-year-old from Poteau, Okla., can flip words around and spit them back out almost instantly -- it took me, on the other hand, like 45 seconds to just write that sentence backwards. 

Thanks to Alyssa's weird mental rewind button, she's become something of an Internet celebrity -- her YouTube video has gotten more than 1 million hits. 

Here's the video that launched Alyssa to mini-stardom.

OK, fine, she is maybe saying "huh?" to buy time when facing some of the longer words -- kaleidoscope, withdrawal, Lamborghini. But still -- impressive, right? Absolutely. But Andrew Levine can easily pu-eno Alyssa.

Levine, a research professor in philosophy at the University of Maryland at College Park, can speak entire sentences backward, in the four languages he knows (that's English, French, German and Italian, if you're interested) and in languages he's unfamiliar with. When asked what's happening in his mind when he speaks in backward gibberish, Levine can't say.

"If this girl is doing it the same way I'm doing it, it's nothing. It's like you're speaking another language," Levine says. "In fact, I think that I am effectively bilingual, in the sense that if you were genuinely bilingual, nothing would be going on in your brain." In other words, Levine doesn't consciously think, "TODAY: Y-A-D-O-T." He's just come to innately understand that TODAY backwards is YADOT, sort of like a person bilingual in Spanish and English knows that the words "today" and "hoy" are different ways of saying the same thing. 

About 30 years ago, Levine experienced a brief, weird brush with fame similar to the one Alyssa's experiencing now: He was a guest on "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson and was, he says, "a huge hit in Japan." He was also one of the subjects of a series of studies done back then on backward speech, conducted by Lewis Leavitt and then-graduate student Nelson Cowan.

Leavitt says he was curious whether a knack for reverse speech required an unusually strong memory; instead, they found it seems to require no particular special talents or heightened understanding of the English language. Backward-speakers like Levine seem to have taught themselves to hear each word sound-by-sound (or phoneme-by-phoneme, in academic speak). Alyssa, on the other hand, says she sees the word spelled in her head, and she's able to mentally flip it around and pronounce it.

"Backward speech is one of these things that seems to be an equal opportunity skill," explains Leavitt, who's now professor emeritus of pediatrics at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He illustrates this fact with some brief sketches of a handful of those study participants: a Stanford professor, a woman in the UK's House of Lords, a "German striptease artist." The stripper, incidentally, used to include backward speech in her act, and sent Levine a tape so he could check it out. "The striptease itself wasn't all that interesting, but her facility of backward speech was really quite impressive," Leavitt says.

The point is: Backward speakers come from all sorts of backgrounds, although they do have a few things in common. "They tend to be kids who do very well in school, who are smart and who have a decent-size vocabulary, but they are not necessarily kids who have a spectacular memory," Leavitt says. "So it's a skill that they practice, just like the violin."

Starting at around age 8 and tapering off around 13, kids tend to become interested in playing with language -- they might create their own language or make up one with a friend, or they might play around with backward speech. Most kids move on, but a few stick with it. Around this age, Leavitt explains, kids are getting huge bursts of brain power, while at the same time honing their social skills. That cognitive combo helps explain why this tends to be an age of all sorts of "obsessions," some more useful than others: Justin Bieber, "Twilight," a particular video game. In Alyssa's case, it seems backward speech may have been the thing to take hold.

"It's a combination of new cultural, as well as cognitive, prowess, and that's shown in a lot of their activities. And for some, it's developing certain special interests," Leavitt explains. "If you reflect back on your own childhood, you may even find something you were really into at that time." (A fascinating October episode of "This American Life" explores this idea in greater detail.)

In many cases, the things kids obsess over -- Bieber, backward talk, whatever -- may be helping them figure out where they fit in the world, but most of these esoteric interests aren't exactly going to lead to lucrative career options. Back in the early 1980s, when Levine appeared on TV and in newspapers all across the world, people kept telling him, Get an agent! Start an act!

He stuck with academia.

"It was funny 30 years ago," he remembers, "and if it had led to a career on 'Hollywood Squares' or something, I would've stayed with it." 

Can you (or a friend or family member) klat drawkcab? Brag about it on our Facebook page.

Related:

• Teen has tongue surgery to speak Korean. Huh?
• More college women speak in creaks, thanks to pop stars
• Pahking the cah? Regional accents getting stronger

Rca / RCA

Pop stars like Ke$ha use vocal fry to drop their voices down into lower notes. Researchers say the croaky sounds are becoming more prevalent in college-aged women's speech.

The influence of pop singers like Britney Spears and Ke$ha may actually be changing the way some young women speak, suggests a (small) new study.

The report, recently published online in the Journal of Voice, examines the prevalence of a speech pattern called "vocal fry," the creaky, rough, guttural sound that pop singers sometimes use to slip into lower notes. Nassima Abdelli-Beruh, one of the study authors (along with Lesley Wolk and Dianne Slavin) and a speech scientist at Long Island University, describes the sound like "rattled, popping air." 

Can you hear in your head the way Spears croaks the line "Oh baby, baby" in "Baby One More Time"? (If not, watch the video here.) The first two seconds of the Ke$ha hit "Blah Blah Blah" is another good example. And as our pals over at Maddow Blog point out, you can hear vocal fry in practically every word out of Kim Kardashian's mouth. Listen to an example from the study provided by Abdelli-Beruh here:

Vocal fry has historically been considered a speech disorder, the study authors note, often seen in patients with vocal cord damage. Specifically, the speech habit can cause contact granulomas, benign but painful lesions on the vocal cords.

But this study suggests the quirk is becoming normalized. Researchers from Long Island University recorded speech from 34 college-aged women, and found that more than two-thirds of them used the croaky "vocal fry" sounds, usually dipping into the low, creaky register at the end of a sentence.

"My colleagues and I have noticed this speech pattern in our young female college students," says Abdelli-Beruh, adding that about 99 percent of their students are female. After publishing the data on vocal fry in college women, she and her team did a similar study on college men, and found that the guys are much less likely to speak in croaks. "Interestingly, some research indicates that in some dialects of British English, male speakers use fry more often than female. So maybe it is also a gender marker," Abdelli-Beruh says.

It's likely also a generational marker. "(A)necdotally, vocal fry is judged to be annoying by those who are not as young as the college students we tested," she says. "My son, who is a teenager, listens to 92.3 NOW in NYC. I noticed the way the voice said 'NOW' on the radio (is) clearly glottal fry."

The volunteer speakers didn't use vocal fry when speaking vowel sounds, suggesting the trend is more habitual or social than anything else. "It is possible that these college students have either practiced or observed this vocal register and modeled it to match popular figures," the authors write, noting that future research will explore the social nature of vocal fry. But the continuous use of the guttural speech could put these young women at risk for vocal cord damage. (It's tough to produce the sound loudly, so the croak may cause increased vocal cord tension and fatigue.) 

Have you noticed croaky, throaty sounds in young women's speech? Share your favorite example in the comments, or on our Facebook page.

UPDATE: Best comment so far, from Facebook fan Amelia Price: "These girls sound like a bunch of neurotic dolphins who do not make sense." Brilliant. Can you top that?

Related: 

• Pahking the cah? Regional accents getting stronger
• Teen has tongue surgery to speak Korean. Huh?
• Gay or straight? His speech may give a hint

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Focus Features

Roight, then! Oi'm Anne Hathaway. Pip pip cheerio.

No matter your opinion of "The Help's" take on 1960s social issues, we can likely all agree on this: Emma Stone's fake Southern accent is ... not great. Today, the similarly bad-accent-plagued Anne Hathaway film "One Day" opens -- a movie that owes much of its Internet buzz to Hathaway's dreadful attempt (so they say! We haven't seen the film) to sound British. 

But take it easy on Stone and Hathaway. Emerging research suggests that, at least for some, the ability to imitate an accent may be innate, related to the shape of the brain's auditory cortex. 

Neurologist Sophie Scott recently published a study that looked at images of the brains of phoneticians, specialists in phonetics who are able to pick up very subtle differences to regional accents. Through these brain scans, called magnetic resonance imaging, Scott and a team of neuroscientists found differences between the phoneticians and the non-phonetician control group in the shape of the left auditory cortex -- a part of the brain that's developed before birth. 

"So I'm sure we won't only find this with phonetics; it's possible that impressionists will have this as well," Scott told the Guardian last month. "It does suggest a biological explanation as to why some people might find the world of sound and speech more interesting."

It's true that with practice, almost anyone can at least improve their ability to imitate accents, says Dr. Amee P. Shah, associate professor and research director in Cleveland State University's speech and hearing program. But Shah, who has taught workshops on "accent modification," says some people she works with, who want a flat, "American" accent, easily pick it up within a few sessions; others struggle for weeks. 

Shah also points out that when we're talking actors, accent mimicry goes hand in hand with "how well they're imitating everything about a person. ... Research does show that (mimicry ability) correlates with someone's ability to do good acting," Shah says. Ouch, Stone and Hathaway. Ouch. 

What's the worst movie accent you can remember? Leave a comment complaining away. 

Related: 

• Teen has tongue surgery to speak Korean. Huh?
• Woman wakes from surgery speaking in vaguely European accent
• What iz zees? Head bonk causes foreign accent

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A British teenager was so desperate to speak the Korean language with the proper accent that she had a surgery that lengthened her tongue, reports The Telegraph. Wait. What?

Nineteen-year-old student Rhiannon Brooksbank loves Korean culture and plans to study it in college. Her only problem: She struggled to correctly pronounce certain sounds in the Korean language, because of her shorter-than-average tongue, "caused by an unusually thick lingual frenulum – the flap of skin that joins the underside of the tongue to the floor of the mouth," the UK paper reports. More from The Telegraph:

Her parents agreed to her having a lingual frenectomy, a 15–minute operation under local anaesthetic that involved an incision in the flap of skin. Rhiannon admitted that it was "agony at first" but her tongue is now about 1cm longer and she can say words that were impossible before.

So is surgery the answer to shaking an unwanted accent? Not exactly, explains Dr. Amee P. Shah, associate professor and research director in Cleveland State University's speech and hearing program. Brooksbank likely had a condition called ankyloglossia, often nicknamed "tongue-tie," because it restricts the tongue's movement, keeping it tethered too close to the lower jaw -- which can result in in a number of speech problems, says Shaw.

Although Shah has not treated Brooksbank, she expects the teenager didn't just have problems correctly pronouncing Korean words -- she likely has had problems pronouncing English words, too. Shah explains that a "tongue-tied" person would have trouble pronouncing all vowels, and especially the consonants that are formed using the front and the top of the mouth, like T, D, L, R, S, Z, N and Y. But there's nothing unique about the Korean language that would require a lingual frenectomy. The Korean language doesn't "have an 'L' and 'R' distinction the way we do, but they do have a version that sounds like 'L' or 'R,' depending on the situation," Shah says. "They do have the vowels 'e' and 'ah' -- those would be affected."

The teenager's surgery sounds like an extreme measure, but Shah explains that a lingual frenectomy is actually a very common procedure, normally done in children who are born with a shorter tongue and thicker frenulum. But people like Brooksbank who have the procedure done later in life, usually require speech therapy in addition to the frenectomy to correct the pronunciation habits they've formed over the years to compensate for the shorter tongue.

Follow msnbc.com health writer Melissa Dahl on Twitter: @melissadahl.

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