What makes a charismatic speaker? The present study extends this question into the prosodic dimension of voice quality. We analyzed various F0, LTAS and LTF long-term spectral characteristics from 12 L2 speakers of English who were recorded while giving entrepreneurial speeches. The results of the acoustic analysis were correlated with indirect judgments of the entrepreneurs' charismatic performances by 98 listeners. The correlations we found replicate previous findings in that a larger F0 range and a higher/lower F0 level are beneficial for a male/female speaker's perceived charisma. Moreover, LTAS settings that are indicative of a fuller and less breathy voice also led to higher speaker charisma ratings. The same applies to LTF settings that are indicative of a larger body or vocaltract size. The findings are discussed with respect to their implications for measuring and training charismatic speech, traditional rhetoric statements and the definition of charisma.

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The present study compares the voice quality of female and male speech in two languages: Czech, a Slavic language, and Danish, a Germanic language. For both languages, the results based on a total of 120 vocally healthy speakers are in line with the claim that females are universally breathier than males. This was supported by the Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP) and H1*-H2* measures, which are generally known as the most robust correlates of breathiness, and also by the H1*-A3* measure. However, the sex distinction was unsupported or even contradictory when using some other measures suggested to reflect breathiness, which provides an incentive to insist on employing a number of acoustic measures in future voice research. The perceptual component of the study nevertheless suggests that these contradictory findings are due to differences in perceived roughness rather than breathiness, and that CPP and H1*-H2* do reflect breathiness differences, and CPP in particular. We therefore conclude that it is indeed the case that female speakers are breathier than male speakers. Finally, in terms of the two robust measures (CPP and H1*-H2*), no language-specific differences in the magnitude of the effect of sex on breathiness were found.

One challenge for the second language (L2) learner of English is to master a novel phonetic implementation of the voicing contrast, whereas another challenge is to learn how consonant sequences behave in connected speech. Learners of English coming from three different language backgrounds were tested; their native varieties were Bohemian Czech, Moravian Czech, and Slovak. The Moravian variety of Czech is more similar in voicing assimilation to the Slovak language than to the Bohemian variety of Czech. Percentage of phonetic voicing was measured in the L2 (i.e. English) word-final obstruents preceding three classes of sounds: voiceless and voiced obstruents, and sonorants. Bohemian and Moravian speakers exhibited different strategies in pre-sonorant contexts, following their native (variety-specific) assimilation rules.