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.
Cite as: Ward, N., Kirkland, A., Wlodarczak, M., Székely, É. (2022) Two Pragmatic Functions of Breathy Voice in American English Conversation. Proc. Speech Prosody 2022, 82-86, doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2022-17
@inproceedings{ward22_speechprosody,
author={Nigel Ward and Ambika Kirkland and Marcin Wlodarczak and Éva Székely},
title={{Two Pragmatic Functions of Breathy Voice in American English Conversation}},
year=2022,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2022},
pages={82--86},
doi={10.21437/SpeechProsody.2022-17}
}