Breathiness accompanied by a soft v

Breathiness accompanied by a soft voice quality appeared rhythmically along the utterances of the speaker FYM (mother), when she was reading stories to her child. This change in voice quality (from the speaker’s normal speaking voice) is found to display expressivity and is thought to have the effect of calling/catching the attention of the listener, while expressing gentleness/tenderness. This speaking style could be related to a “code switching” where individuals modify their voices in the presence of young children. Regarding the rhythm of breathiness within an utterance, spectrogram and pitch analyses (e.g., Figure 8(f)) indicate that during the breathy utterances in story readings, breathiness occurs more frequently in low-pitch intervals, while the voice quality tends to get back to modal phonation in high-pitch intervals. This rhythm pattern was observed in 90% of the “gentle/tender” tokens. This pattern is in contrast with the emphasized/excited speech in Figure 8(c), where breathiness is more prominent in high-pitch intervals than in low-pitch intervals. Further, although this speaking style was predominant in story readings, it also appeared (with less frequency) when the speaker was talking to her child in a gentle/tender manner.