Oliver Niebuhr | University of Southern Denmark (original) (raw)

Papers by Oliver Niebuhr

7th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2014

Cadernos de Linguística

Phonetic research on the prosodic sources of perceived charisma has taken a big step towards maki... more Phonetic research on the prosodic sources of perceived charisma has taken a big step towards making a speaker’s tone-of-voice a tangible, quantifiable, and trainable matter. However, the tone-of-voice includes a complex bundle of acoustic features, and a lot of parameters have not even been looked at so far. Moreover, all previous studies focused on political or religious leaders and left aside the large field of managers and CEOs in the world of business. These are the two research gaps addressed in the present study. An acoustic analysis of about 1,350 prosodic phrases from keynotes given by a more charismatic CEO (Steve Jobs) and a less charismatic CEO (Mark Zuckerberg) suggests that the same tone-of-voice settings that make political or religious leaders sound more charismatic also work for business speakers. In addition, results point to further charisma-relevant acoustic parameters related to rhythm, emphasis, pausing, and voice quality - as well as to audience type as a signi...

9th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2018

Interspeech 2019

This paper is a first investigation into the influence of the pitch range and the intensity varia... more This paper is a first investigation into the influence of the pitch range and the intensity variation on the number of subscribers, views and likes of YouTube Creators. A total of ten minutes of speech material from five English and five North-American YouTubers was analyzed. The results for pitch range and intensity variation suggest that an increase in both parameters results in higher subscriber counts. For views, there was no influence of pitch range, but an increase in intensity variation results in a lower number of views. Pitch range and intensity variation had no influence on the like count. Furthermore, both origin and gender had an influence on the results. Ultimately, this study will provide further information for the phonetic research of charisma (i.e., the perceived charm, competence, power, and persuasiveness of a speaker), as it is suspected that the acoustic features that have so far been connected to charisma also play an important role in the success of a YouTuber and their channel.

9th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2018

What makes a charismatic speaker? The present study extends this question into the prosodic dimen... more 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.

Frontiers in Communication

Perceived charisma is an important success factor in professional life. However, women are worse ... more Perceived charisma is an important success factor in professional life. However, women are worse than men in conveying physical charisma signals while at the same time having to perform better than men in order to be perceived equally charismatic. Speech prosody probably contains the most influential charisma signals. We have developed a system called "Pascal" that analyzes and assesses on objective acoustic grounds how well-speakers employ their prosodic charisma parameters. Pascal is used for charismatic-speech training in 12-weeks and 4-h courses on entrepreneurship and leadership. Comparing the prosodic-charisma scores for a total of 72 participants at the beginning and end of these two course types showed that female speakers start with significantly lower prosodic-charisma scores than male speakers. However, at the end of the 4-h course, female speakers can catch up with their male counterparts in terms of prosodic charisma. At the end of the 12-weeks courses, male speakers keep their lead, but female speakers are able to significantly reduce the prosodic charisma gap to male speakers. Since leadership and entrepreneurship are still male-dominated domains, our results can be seen as an encouragement for women to attend prosodic charisma training. Furthermore, these courses require a gender-specific design as we found men to improve mainly in F0 parameters and women in duration and phonation parameters.

Revista Leitura

The paper presents a combined production and perception study on speech rhythm in German. The per... more The paper presents a combined production and perception study on speech rhythm in German. The perception part shows that identifying complex rhythm patterns is only possible for speaking rates of 4-8 syll/sec. Even acoustically monotonous stimuli within this range trigger "subjective rhythms". In contrast, rhythm perception is flattened for speaking rates outside this range, irrespective of acoustic cues to rhythm. The production part accords with this finding. Speaking rates in everyday conversation vary between 4-8 syll/sec, and only fall below this range when speakers flatten their rhythm for emphatic purposes. Together, the production and perception evidence revealed a "rhythm window", which is targeted or avoided by speakers.

Segmental, prosodic and fluency features in phonetic learner corpora

We tested the usability of prosody visualization techniques for second language (L2) learners. Ei... more We tested the usability of prosody visualization techniques for second language (L2) learners. Eighteen Danish learners realized target sentences in German based on different visualization techniques. The sentence realizations were annotated by means of the phonological Kiel Intonation Model and then analyzed in terms of (a) prosodic-pattern consistency and (b) correctness of the prosodic patterns. In addition, the participants rated the usability of the visualization techniques. The results from the phonological analysis converged with the usability ratings in showing that iconic techniques, in particular the stylized “hat pattern” visualization, performed better than symbolic techniques, and that marking prosodic information beyond intonation can be more confusing than instructive. In discussing our findings, we also provide a description of the new Danish-German learner corpus we created: DANGER. It is freely available for interested researchers upon request.

Phonetica

Words like yeah, okay and (al)right are fairly unspecific in their lexical semantics, and not lea... more Words like yeah, okay and (al)right are fairly unspecific in their lexical semantics, and not least for this reason there is a general tendency for them to occur with highly varied and expressive prosodic patterns across languages. Here we examine in depth the prosodic forms that express eight pragmatic functions of the Czech discourse marker jasně, including resignation, reassurance, surprise, indifference or impatience. Using a collection of 172 tokens from a corpus of scripted dialogues by 30 native speakers, we performed acoustic analyses, applied classification algorithms and solicited judgments from native listeners in a perceptual experiment. There appeared to be multi-parametric differences between jasně realizations in terms of their F0, timing and intensity patterns, which gave rise to generally consistent form-function mappings. For example, resignation seems to be realized with a falling intonation contour, relatively slow tempo, long wordinitial consonant and a short wo...

Speech Prosody 2016, 2016

Speech Prosody 2016, 2016

Speech Prosody 2016, 2016

Linguistik Online, Jun 25, 2013

Taking up anecdotal evidence, our general research aim is to investigate and to quantify the phon... more Taking up anecdotal evidence, our general research aim is to investigate and to quantify the phonetic characteristics of Low German in different Northern German regions on the basis of detailed acoustic and auditory analyses. In the initial pilot study presented here, we focus on phonologically long vowels. The analyses are based on a sample of long-vowel tokens, which were produced by 18 Northern German speakers in spontaneous translations of the 'Wenker' sentences. The speakers had comparable dialectal competences, but came from different regions of Northern Germany,

7th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2014

Cadernos de Linguística

Phonetic research on the prosodic sources of perceived charisma has taken a big step towards maki... more Phonetic research on the prosodic sources of perceived charisma has taken a big step towards making a speaker’s tone-of-voice a tangible, quantifiable, and trainable matter. However, the tone-of-voice includes a complex bundle of acoustic features, and a lot of parameters have not even been looked at so far. Moreover, all previous studies focused on political or religious leaders and left aside the large field of managers and CEOs in the world of business. These are the two research gaps addressed in the present study. An acoustic analysis of about 1,350 prosodic phrases from keynotes given by a more charismatic CEO (Steve Jobs) and a less charismatic CEO (Mark Zuckerberg) suggests that the same tone-of-voice settings that make political or religious leaders sound more charismatic also work for business speakers. In addition, results point to further charisma-relevant acoustic parameters related to rhythm, emphasis, pausing, and voice quality - as well as to audience type as a signi...

9th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2018

Interspeech 2019

This paper is a first investigation into the influence of the pitch range and the intensity varia... more This paper is a first investigation into the influence of the pitch range and the intensity variation on the number of subscribers, views and likes of YouTube Creators. A total of ten minutes of speech material from five English and five North-American YouTubers was analyzed. The results for pitch range and intensity variation suggest that an increase in both parameters results in higher subscriber counts. For views, there was no influence of pitch range, but an increase in intensity variation results in a lower number of views. Pitch range and intensity variation had no influence on the like count. Furthermore, both origin and gender had an influence on the results. Ultimately, this study will provide further information for the phonetic research of charisma (i.e., the perceived charm, competence, power, and persuasiveness of a speaker), as it is suspected that the acoustic features that have so far been connected to charisma also play an important role in the success of a YouTuber and their channel.

9th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2018

What makes a charismatic speaker? The present study extends this question into the prosodic dimen... more 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.

Frontiers in Communication

Perceived charisma is an important success factor in professional life. However, women are worse ... more Perceived charisma is an important success factor in professional life. However, women are worse than men in conveying physical charisma signals while at the same time having to perform better than men in order to be perceived equally charismatic. Speech prosody probably contains the most influential charisma signals. We have developed a system called "Pascal" that analyzes and assesses on objective acoustic grounds how well-speakers employ their prosodic charisma parameters. Pascal is used for charismatic-speech training in 12-weeks and 4-h courses on entrepreneurship and leadership. Comparing the prosodic-charisma scores for a total of 72 participants at the beginning and end of these two course types showed that female speakers start with significantly lower prosodic-charisma scores than male speakers. However, at the end of the 4-h course, female speakers can catch up with their male counterparts in terms of prosodic charisma. At the end of the 12-weeks courses, male speakers keep their lead, but female speakers are able to significantly reduce the prosodic charisma gap to male speakers. Since leadership and entrepreneurship are still male-dominated domains, our results can be seen as an encouragement for women to attend prosodic charisma training. Furthermore, these courses require a gender-specific design as we found men to improve mainly in F0 parameters and women in duration and phonation parameters.

Revista Leitura

The paper presents a combined production and perception study on speech rhythm in German. The per... more The paper presents a combined production and perception study on speech rhythm in German. The perception part shows that identifying complex rhythm patterns is only possible for speaking rates of 4-8 syll/sec. Even acoustically monotonous stimuli within this range trigger "subjective rhythms". In contrast, rhythm perception is flattened for speaking rates outside this range, irrespective of acoustic cues to rhythm. The production part accords with this finding. Speaking rates in everyday conversation vary between 4-8 syll/sec, and only fall below this range when speakers flatten their rhythm for emphatic purposes. Together, the production and perception evidence revealed a "rhythm window", which is targeted or avoided by speakers.

Segmental, prosodic and fluency features in phonetic learner corpora

We tested the usability of prosody visualization techniques for second language (L2) learners. Ei... more We tested the usability of prosody visualization techniques for second language (L2) learners. Eighteen Danish learners realized target sentences in German based on different visualization techniques. The sentence realizations were annotated by means of the phonological Kiel Intonation Model and then analyzed in terms of (a) prosodic-pattern consistency and (b) correctness of the prosodic patterns. In addition, the participants rated the usability of the visualization techniques. The results from the phonological analysis converged with the usability ratings in showing that iconic techniques, in particular the stylized “hat pattern” visualization, performed better than symbolic techniques, and that marking prosodic information beyond intonation can be more confusing than instructive. In discussing our findings, we also provide a description of the new Danish-German learner corpus we created: DANGER. It is freely available for interested researchers upon request.

Phonetica

Words like yeah, okay and (al)right are fairly unspecific in their lexical semantics, and not lea... more Words like yeah, okay and (al)right are fairly unspecific in their lexical semantics, and not least for this reason there is a general tendency for them to occur with highly varied and expressive prosodic patterns across languages. Here we examine in depth the prosodic forms that express eight pragmatic functions of the Czech discourse marker jasně, including resignation, reassurance, surprise, indifference or impatience. Using a collection of 172 tokens from a corpus of scripted dialogues by 30 native speakers, we performed acoustic analyses, applied classification algorithms and solicited judgments from native listeners in a perceptual experiment. There appeared to be multi-parametric differences between jasně realizations in terms of their F0, timing and intensity patterns, which gave rise to generally consistent form-function mappings. For example, resignation seems to be realized with a falling intonation contour, relatively slow tempo, long wordinitial consonant and a short wo...

Speech Prosody 2016, 2016

Speech Prosody 2016, 2016

Speech Prosody 2016, 2016

Linguistik Online, Jun 25, 2013

Taking up anecdotal evidence, our general research aim is to investigate and to quantify the phon... more Taking up anecdotal evidence, our general research aim is to investigate and to quantify the phonetic characteristics of Low German in different Northern German regions on the basis of detailed acoustic and auditory analyses. In the initial pilot study presented here, we focus on phonologically long vowels. The analyses are based on a sample of long-vowel tokens, which were produced by 18 Northern German speakers in spontaneous translations of the 'Wenker' sentences. The speakers had comparable dialectal competences, but came from different regions of Northern Germany,