What is Charismatic Speech?

1. A Cross-Cultural Comparison of American, Palestinian, and Swedish Perception of Charismatic Speech FadiBiadsy*, Andrew Rosenberg*, Rolf Carlson†, Julia Hirschberg*, and Eva Strangert†† *Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, New York, USA † CSC, Department of Speech, Music and Hearing, KTH, Stockholm, Sweden †† Department of Comparative Literature and Scandinavian Languages, Ume°a University, Sweden Material and Experiment Design Acoustic/Prosodic Featurs • In English experiments, subjects presented with 45 speech segments of 2–28 secs duration, 5 each from 9 for Democratic nomination for U.S. president in 2004 • Topics: greeting, reasons for running, tax cuts, postwar Iraq, healthcare. Charisma • Ability to attract and retain followers by virtue of personal characteristics - not traditional or political office (Weber ‘47) • What makes an individual charismatic? • Their message? • Their personality? • Their speaking style? Lexical Features • For Arabic experiments, subjects presented with 44 tokens of 3–28 secs duration, 2 each from 22 Palestinian politicians and authors on Aljazeera talk shows. • Topics: the assassination, of the Hamas leader, the debate among the Palestinian, groups, The Intifada and resistance, the Israeli separation wall, the Palestinian Authority and calls for reforms What is Charismatic Speech? Significant positive correlation with charisma Significant negative correlation with charisma • Speech that leads listeners to perceive the speaker as charismatic • What aspects of speech might contribute to the perception of a speaker as charismatic? • Content of message? • Lexico-syntactic features? • Acoustic-prosodic features? Difference in Rating Across Cultures • Pal/Ame Arb: Palestinians rated 7/44 tokens significantly more charismatic, and 1/44 token less charismatic than Americans. • Pal/Ame Eng: Americans rated6/45 tokens significantly more charismatic, and 1/45 less charismatic than Palestinians. • Pal/Swe Eng: Palestinians rated 4/45 tokens more charismatic, and 2/45 less charismatic than Swedish. • __________________________________________________________ • For each pair of groups A and B, identify 4 groups of tokens: those rated significantly less; less, but not significantly so; more, but not significantly more; and significantly more charismatic by group A than by group B • Examine mean values of acoustic-prosodic and lexical features for each group • Which features show monotonic change from token groups 1 to 4? • Judging Arabic tokens • Tokens rated more charismatic by American subjects: Americans find Arabic speakers who employ a faster and more consistent speaking rate, who speak more loudly overall, but who vary this intensity considerably, to be charismatic, while Palestinians show less sensitivity to these qualities. • Tokens that Palestinian raters find to be more charismatic than Americans have fewer disfluencies than tokens considerer more charismatic by Americans. • Judging English tokens: • Tokens rated more charismatic by Americans than Palestinians tend to have a higher speaking rate but to be spoken in lower pitch range for the speaker . • English tokens rated more charismatic by Swedish subjects than by Americans and Palestinianscontain speech produced in a more compressed pitch rangebut with a greater mean HiF0 value. American, Palestinian, and Swedish Subjects Judging English Tokens Is Charisma a Culture-Dependent Phenomenon? • Do people of different languages and cultures perceive charisma differently? • Do they perceive charismatic speech differently? • Do Arabic listeners respond to American politicians the same way Americans do? • Do Swedish listeners hear American politicians the same way Arabic listeners do? American/Palestinian Subjects Judging Arabic/English Tokens Influence of Speaker and Topic on Charisma Ratings • The speaker of a segment significantly influences subjects’ ratings of charisma in all studies. • Tokens of recognized speakers were rated significantly more charismatic than unrecognized speakers in Amer->Eng only. • Topic (in AmericansEng): approaching statistical significance on subjects’ ratings of charisma. • Topic (in the other four studies): influences charisma ratings. Why study Charismatic Speech? • It has intrinsic scientific interest • To identify potential charismatic leaders • To provide a feedback system for individuals who want to improve their speaking style – politicians, professors, students… • To create a charismatic Text-to-Speech system, when compelling speech is needed (e.g., Intelligent tutoring system) Charisma Rating Across Cultures • Compare charisma judgments between each pair of groups who rated the same stimuli • For each group, construct a single charisma score for each token • Perform paired t-test to compare ratings of same tokens by each group Conclusions and Future Work • Some acoustic-prosodic correlates are common across cultures. • Other acoustic-prosodic and lexical correlates are specific to the language rated — yet, curiously, both native and non-native raters exhibit these correlations. • For other correlates, rater judgments of speech in their native language differ markedly from judgments of non-native raters. • Future Work • Machine learning experiments to predict how charismatic a given speech token is, based on our features. • Investigate additional language groups and additional potential correlates of charisma judgments. Our Approach • Collect tokens of charismatic and non-charismatic speech from a small set of speakers on a small set of topics • Ask listeners to rate the ‘The speaker is charismatic’ plus statements about other 25 attributes (e.g., The speaker is boring, charming, persuasive,…) • Correlate listener ratings with lexico-syntactic and acoustic-prosodic features of the tokens to identify potential cues to perception of charisma