Two Pragmatic Functions of Breathy Voice in American English Conversation

Nigel G. Ward, Ambika Kirkland, Marcin Wlodarczak, Eva Szekely

Speech Prosody 2022.

Abstract: Although the paralinguistic and phonological significance of breathy voice is well known, its pragmatic roles have been little studied. We report a systematic exploration of the pragmatic functions of breathy voice in American English, using a small corpus of casual conversations, using the Cepstral Peak Prominence Smoothed measure as an indicator of breathy voice, and using a common workflow to find prosodic constructions and identify their meanings. We found two prosodic constructions involving breathy voice. The first involves a short region of breathy voice in the midst of a region of low pitch, functioning to mark self-directed speech. The second involves breathy voice over several seconds, combined with a moment of wider pitch range leading to a high pitch over about a second, functioning to mark an attempt to establish common ground. These interpretations were confirmed by a perception experiment.

The paper itself, including:

• audio example 1 (dim5neg) "... document ..."
• audio example 2 (dim5neg) "... imagine ..."
• audio example 3 (dim10neg) "... actually ..."
• audio example 4 (dim10neg) "... content ..."
• Figure 1 left, full size (dim5neg)
• Figure 1 right, full size (dim10neg)

Presentation Video

Other Audio Examples

• "... jump, jump! ..."
• "... from EPCC ..."

Resources:

• corpus used for analysis
• code: matlab code, procedure, pbook_cpps.fss, rotationspec.mat
• stimuli (23MB)
• experiment screenshot
• subject judgments: raw data, counts
• analysis: script, results
• poster
• presentation slides
• teaching resources

Additional keywords: self-talk, uptalk, high-rising terminals