This paper proposes that speech analysis be used to quantify prosodic variables in presentation speech, and reports the results of a perception test of speaker liveliness. The test material was taken from a corpus of oral presentations made by 18 Swedish native students of Technical English. Liveliness ratings from a panel of eight judges correlated strongly with normalized standard deviation of F0 and, for female speakers, with mean length of runs, which is the number of syllables between pauses of >250 ms. An application of these findings would be in the development of a feedback mechanism for the prosody of public speaking.
Cite as: Hincks, R. (2005) Measuring liveliness in presentation speech. Proc. Interspeech 2005, 765-768, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2005-353
@inproceedings{hincks05_interspeech,
author={Rebecca Hincks},
title={{Measuring liveliness in presentation speech}},
year=2005,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2005},
pages={765--768},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2005-353}
}