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.
This study reports on research stimulated by Lev-Ari and Keysar (2010) who showed that native listeners find statements delivered by foreign-accented speakers to be less true than those read by native speakers. Our objective was to replicate the study with non-native listeners to see whether this effect is also relevant in international communication contexts. The same set of statements from the original study was recorded by 6 native and 6 non-native speakers of English. 121 non-native listeners rated the truthfulness of the statements on a 7-point scale. The results of our study tentatively do confirm a negative bias against non-native speakers as perceived by non-native listeners, showing that subconscious attitudes to language varieties are also relevant in communication among non-native speakers.
The study investigates the impact of glottal elements before word-initial vowels on the speed of processing of the phrases taken from natural continuous speech. In many languages a word beginning with a vowel can be preceded by a glottal stop or a short period of creaky voice. However, languages differ in the extent of use and functions of this glottalization: it may be used to mark the word boundary, for instance, or to add special prominence to the word. The aim of the experiment was to find out whether the presence of the glottal element can influence reaction times in a word-monitoring paradigm. Users of different languages - Slovak and Czech learners of English, as well as native speakers of English - were participating in perception testing so that the influence of the mother tongue could be determined. The results confirm the effect of both glottalization and the L1 of the listeners. In addition, a significant effect of test item manipulations was found. Although the phrases with added or deleted glottal stops displayed no obvious acoustic artefacts, they produced longer reaction times than items with naturally present or absent glottalizations. We believe that this finding underlines the importance of inherent stress patterns, whose alterations lead to the increase in processing load.
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