The influence of prosody on politicians’ credibility
Issue: Vol 11 No. 1 (2014)
Journal: Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice
Subject Areas: Writing and Composition Linguistics
DOI: 10.1558/japl.32411
Abstract:
Prosody is an important feature in communication, and the way a speaker uses the various elements of prosody in public speaking may affect listeners’ perceptions and thus the speaker’s credibility. This paper explores this topic in relation to speeches made in English by three politicians representing their countries’ 2020 Olympic bids at the 125th IOC (International Olympic Committee) Session in Argentina in September 2013. Of these, the speech given by the Mayor of Madrid, Ana Botella, received widespread critical attention due her style of delivery. As such, it illustrates the importance of prosody in public speaking.
However, how prosody affects credibility remains unclear. The aim of this study is to analyze the influence of prosody on listeners’ perceptions of politicians’ credibility. We conducted prosody analysis and rhetorical analysis on the three-minute speeches given by the different candidates at the IOC Session. We also conducted a credibility test to assess the relationship between prosody and credibility. The results confirm that prosody influences speakers’ credibility, with the most credible and the best speaker being the politician who used the highest loudness, a moderate pitch level with a wide pitch range, and a faster speech rate with enough pauses of sufficient length. The study also showed that the less influential the prosody parameters were, the more credible the speaker was perceived to be.
Author: Emma Rodero, Lluís Mas, María Blanco
References :
Barry, W. (2007) Rhythm as an L2 problem: How prosodic is it? In J. Trouvain and U. Gut (eds) Non-Native Prosody: Phonetic Description and Teaching Practice, 97–120. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Biadsy, F., Rosenberg, A., Carlson, R., Hirschberg, J. and Strangert, E. (2008) A cross-cultural comparison of American, Palestinian, and Swedish perception of charismatic speech. In P. A. Barbosa, S. Madureira and C. Reis (eds) Proceedings of the Speech Prosody 2008 Conference, 579–582. Campinas, Brazil: Luso-Brazilian Association of Speech Sciences.
Bishop, C. (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso Books.
Boersma, P. and Weenink, D. (2017) Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer [Software]. Amsterdam: Department of Language and Literature, University of Amsterdam. Retrieved from: http://www.praat.org
Boula de Mareuil, P. and Vieru-Dimulescu, B. (2006) The contribution of prosody to the perception of foreign accent. Phonetica 63 (4): 247–267. https://doi.org/10.1159/000097308
Burgoon, J. K., Birk, T. and Pfau, M. (1990) Nonverbal behaviors, persuasion, and credibility. Human Communication Research 17 (1): 140–169. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.1990.tb00229.x
Burke, P. (1993) Art of Conversation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Calhoun, S. (2006) Information Structure and the Prosodic Structure of English: A Probabilistic Relationship. Unpublished doctorial dissertation, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh.
Cevasco, J. and Marmolejo Ramos, F. (2013) The importance of studying prosody in the comprehension of spontaneous spoken discourse. Revista latinoamericana de psicología 45 (1): 21–33.
Chebat, J. C. and Filiatrault, P. (1987) Credibility, source identification and message acceptance: The case of political persuasion. Political Communication 4 (3): 153–160. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.1987.9962818
Chebat, J. C., El Hedhli, K., Gelinas-Chebat, C. and Boivin, R. (2007) Voice and persuasion in a banking telemarketing context. Perceptual and Motor Skills 104 (2): 419–437. https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.104.2.419-437
Clark, H. H. and Wasow, T. (1998) Repeating words in spontaneous speech. Cognitive Psychology 37 (3): 201–242. https://doi.org/10.1006/cogp.1998.0693
Clark, T. and Greatbatch, D. (2011) Audience perceptions of charismatic and noncharismatic oratory: The case of management gurus. Leadership Quarterly 22 (1): 22–32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2010.12.004
Cutler, A. and Pearson, M. (1986) On the analysis of prosodic turn-taking cues. In C. Johns- Lewis (eds) Intonation in Discourse, 139–156. San Diego, CA: College Hill.
De Meo, A. (2012) How credible is a non-native speaker? Prosody and surroundings. In M. Grazia Busa and A. Stella (eds) Methodological Perspectives on Second Language Prosody: Papers from ML2P, 3–9. Padua: CLEUP.
De Meo, A., Vitale, M., Pettorino, M. and Martin, P. (2011) Acoustic-perceptual credibility correlates of news reading by native and Chinese speakers of Italian. In W.-S. Lee and E. Zee (eds) Proceeding of the XVII CPhS, 1366–1369. Hong Kong: Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong.
Deschamps, A. (1980) The syntactical distribution of pauses in English spoken as a second language by French students. In H. W. Dechert and M. Raupach (eds) Temporal Variables in Speech, 255–262. The Hague: Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110816570.255
Gelinas-Chebat, C., Chebat, J. C. and Vaninsky, A. (1996) Voice and advertising: Effects of intonation and intensity of voice on source credibility, attitudes toward the advertised service and the intent to buy. Perceptual and Motor Skills 83 (1): 243–262. https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.1996.83.1.243
Gillis, R. and Nilsen, E. S. (2014) Cognitive flexibility supports preschoolers’ detection of communicative ambiguity. First Language 34 (1): 58–71. https://doi.org/10.1177/0142723714521839
Gussenhoven, C. (2002) Intonation and interpretation: Phonetics and phonology. In B. Bel and I. Marlien (eds) Proceedings of the Speech Prosody 2002 Conference, 47–57. Aix-en-Provence: Universite de Provence.
Gussenhoven, C. (2004) The Phonology of Tone and Intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511616983
Hincks, R. (2004) Processing the prosody of oral presentations. In R. Delmonte, P. Delcloque and S. Tonellli (eds), Proceedings of InSTIL/ICALL2004 NLP and Speech Technologies in Advanced Language Learning, 63–66. Padua: Unipress.
Hincks, R. (2010) Speaking rate and information content in English lingua franca oral presentations. English for Specific Purposes 29 (1): 4–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2009.05.004
Hirschberg, J. (2002) Communication and prosody: Functional aspects of prosody. Speech Communication 36 (1–2): 31–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-6393(01)00024-3
Infante, D. A. (1980) The construct validity of semantic differential scales for the measurement of source credibility. Communication Quarterly 28 (2): 19–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/01463378009369363
Johannesson, K. (1998) Retorikeller Iconsten att overtyga. Stockholm: Norstedts Forlag.
Kenton, S. B. (1989) Speaker credibility in persuasive business communication: A model which explains gender differences 1. Journal of Business Communication 26 (2): 143–157. https://doi.org/10.1177/002194368902600204
Kormos, J. and Denes, M. (2004) Exploring measures and perceptions of fluency in the speech of second language learners. System 32 (2): 145–164. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2004.01.001
LaBarbera, P. and MacLachlan, J. (1979) Time-compressed speech in radio advertising. Journal of Marketing 43 (1): 30–36. https://doi.org/10.2307/1250755
Ladd, D. R. (2008) Intonational Phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511808814
Lev-Ari, S. and Keysar, B. (2010) Why don’t we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46 (6): 1093–1096. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2010.05.025
Levis, J. M. and Wichmann, A. (2015) English intonation – Form and meaning. In M. Reed and J. Levis (eds) The Handbook of English Pronunciation, 139–147. Oxford: Wiley- Blackwell.
McCroskey, J. (1971) Ethos, credibility, and communication in the real world. North Carolina Journal of Speech 4 (1): 24–31.
McCroskey, J. C. and Teven, J. J. (1999) Goodwill: A reexamination of the construct and its measurement. Communication Monographs 66 (1): 90–103. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637759909376464
Mitchell, R. L. C. and Ross, E. D. (2013) Attitudinal prosody: What we know and directions for future study. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 37 (3): 471–479. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2013.01.027
Munro, M. J. and Derwing, T. M. (2001) Modeling perceptions of the accentedness and comprehensibility of L2 speech the role of speaking rate. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 23 (4): 451–468.
Oppenheimer, D. M. (2008) The secret life of fluency. Trends in Cognitive Science 12 (6): 237–241. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2008.02.014
Pickering, L. (2004) The structure and function of intonational paragraphs in native and nonnative speaker instructional discourse. English for Specific Purposes 23 (1): 19–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0889-4906(03)00020-6
Podlipsky, V. J., Šimačkova, Š. and Petraž, D. (2016) Is there an interlanguage speech credibility benefit? Topics in Linguistics 17 (1): 30–44. https://doi.org/10.1515/topling-2016-0003
Roberts, C. (2010) Correlations among variables in message and messenger credibility scales. American Behavioral Scientist 54 (1): 43–56.
Rodero, E. (2007) Characterization of a presentation on audiovisual media. Estudios sobre el mensaje periodístico 13 (1): 523–542.
Rodero, E. (2013) Peculiar styles when narrating the news: The intonation of radio news bulletins. Estudios sobre el mensaje periodístico 19 (1): 519–532.
Rodero, E. (2015a) Influence of speech rate and information density on recognition: The moderate dynamic mechanism. Media Psychology 19 (2): 224–242. https://doi.org/10.1080/15213269.2014.1002942
Rodero, E. (2015b) The principle of distinctive and contrastive coherence of prosody in radio news: An analysis of perception and recognition. Journal of Nonverbal Behaviour 39 (1): 79–92. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-014-0201-5
Rognoni, L. (2012) The impact of prosody in foreign accent detection: A perception study of Italian accent in English. In M. Grazia Busa and A. Stella (eds) Methodological Perspectives on Second Language Prosody: Papers from ML2P, 89–93. Padua: CLEUP.
Rosenberg, A. and Hirschberg, J. (2005) Acoustic/prosodic and lexical correlates of charismatic speech. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2005, 513–516. Lisbon: ISCA.
Rosenberg, R. and Hirschberg, J. (2009) Charisma perception from text and speech. Speech Communication 51 (7): 640–655. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2008.11.001
Strangert, E. (2005) Prosody in public speech: Analyses of a news announcement and a political interview. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2005, 3401–3404. Lisbon: ISCA.
Strangert, E. and Gustafson, J. (2008) What makes a good speaker? Subject ratings, acoustic measurements and perceptual evaluations. Proceedings of INTERSPEECH-2008, 1688– 1691. Brisbane: ISCA.
Taboada, M. and Mann, W. C. (2006) Rhetorical Structure Theory: Looking back and moving ahead. Discourse Studies 8 (3): 423–459. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445606061881
Teven, J. J. (2008) An examination of perceived credibility of the 2008 presidential candidates: Relationships with believability, likeability, and deceptiveness. Human Communication 11 (4): 391–408.
Touati, P. (1993) Prosodic aspects of political rhetoric. Paper presented at the ESCA Workshop on Prosody, Lund University, Sweden. Retrieved from http://www.iscaspeech.org/archive_open/archive_papers/prosody_93/pro3_168.pdf
Traunmuller, H. and Eriksson, A. (1995) The frequency range of the voice fundamental in the speech of male and female adults. Unpublished manuscript, Stockholms Universitet, Stockholm.
Tuppen, C. (1974) Dimensions of communicator credibility: An oblique solution. Speech Monograph 41 (3): 253–260. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637757409375844
Wagner, M. and Watson, D. G. (2010) Experimental and theoretical advances in prosody: A review. Language and cognitive processes 25 (7–9): 905–945. https://doi.org/10.1080/01690961003589492
Wells, R. O. (2007) Differential Analysis on Complex Manifolds. New York: Springer.
Wichmann, A. (2000) Intonation in Text and Discourse. Harlow, UK: Pearson Education.
Wichmann, A. (2011) Prosody and pragmatic effects. In G. Andersen and K. Aijmer (eds) Pragmatics of Society, 181–214. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110214420.181
Wichmann, A. (2014) Discourse Intonation. Covenant Journal of Language Studies 2 (1): 1–14.
Wichmann, A., House, J. and Rietveld, T. (1997) Peak displacement and topic structure. In A. Botinis, G. Kouroupetroglou and G. Carayiannis (eds) Intonation: Theory, Models and Applications, 329–332. Athens: ESCA and University of Athens.