Advancing higher-education practice by analyzing and training students' vocal charisma: Evidence from a Danish field study

[EN] Charismatic speaking skills, particularly those of the voice, are known to be an important asset of managers, politicians, and even teachers. Students have so far been less in the limelight in this regard, although modern collaborative-learning and oral-examination concepts suggest that vocal charisma can already be a decisive factor for study success as well. The present paper examines this question based on 82 electrical-engineering students. Their initial self-introductions in front of the other fellow students were analyzed using a new acoustic technology that translates 16 voice features into a total vocal charisma (PASCAL) score. Results show that these PASCAL scores are overall low (i.e. improvable) and positively correlated with the oral exam grades of both individual students and student teams. Moreover, the teams' PASCAL scores positively correlate with the per-formance in the "Marshmallow Challenge", i.e. a creative teamwork task. Additional in-depth analyses show that teams without any above-average charismatic student performed worst, but that teams with more than one above-average charismatic student struggled with leadership conflicts and solo actions. We interpret our findings as a strong plea for (vocal) charisma analysis to be integrated in higher-education practice both for managing team dynamics and performance and for increasing individual study success.Niebuhr, O. (2021). Advancing higher-education practice by analyzing and training students' vocal charisma: Evidence from a Danish field study. En 7th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd'21). Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 743-751. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAd21.2021.12827OCS74375

Eine Kontrastive Phonetische Analyse Niederdeutscher Langvokale

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, i. e. Schleswig, Holstein, Dithmarschen, Ostfriedland, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, or Nordbrandenburg. The selected vowel tokens occurred in contexts that were phonetically controlled in terms of both consonantal coarticulation and prosodic structure. The acoustic analysis included measuring durations, formant frequencies (F1-F3) and intonation characteristics (pitch-accent F0 patterns). The auditory analysis was made by narrow phonetic transcriptions. The results of the two analyses agree in showing clear regional differences. They concern the distributions of the long vowels within the vowel space (i.e. the vowel qualities, their stabilities and phonetic distances to each other) as well as the pitch-accent intonation patterns that co-occur with the long vowels. Differences in vowel duration were not found. Nordbrandenburg and Schleswig are characterized by a wide spectrum of monophthongal long-vowel qualities. In contrast, the long vowels in Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Ostfriesland show less diverse quality differences in the vowel centre. However, overall the phonetic diversity is still there in terms of diphthongizations that start or end at very different qualities. The long vowels of Dithmarschen combine the two characteristics, i.e. diphthongal qualities with relatively large differences in the vowel centre. As regards the intonation patterns across the vowels, we found that Dithmarschen and Holstein are both characterized by rising-falling pitch-accent peaks, but with different alignments relative to the vowel boundaries. The pitch-accent intonations of our speakers from Ostfriesland also rose and fell across the vowel. However, unlike in all other regions they additionally showed a striking F0 shape with a long high plateau in between the rising and falling movements. Our results are discussed with regard to the current claims about the dialectal organization of Northern Germany

Speech data acquisition: the underestimated challenge

(This version makes 1 correction to the references: BARBOSA 2012 was cited in the text but missing from the list of references.)International audienceThe second half of the 20th century was the dawn of information technology; and we now live in the digital age. Experimental studies of prosody develop at a fast pace, in the context of an "explosion of evidence" (Janet Pierrehumbert, Speech Prosody 2010, Chicago). The ease with which anyone can now do recordings should not veil the complexity of the data collection process, however. This article aims at sensitizing students and scientists from the various fields of speech and language research to the fact that speech-data acquisition is an underestimated challenge. Eliciting data that reflect the communicative processes at play in language requires special precautions in devising experimental procedures and a fundamental understanding of both ends of the elicitation process: speaker and recording facilities. The article compiles basic information on each of these requirements and recapitulates some pieces of practical advice, drawing many examples from prosody studies, a field where the thoughtful conception of experimental protocols is especially crucial

Dip and hat pattern: a phonological contrast of German?

Is the high plateau in a ‘hat pattern’ a phonetic artefact, or does it reflect a phonological feature? Can it contrast with a low plateau, i.e., a ‘dip pattern’? The presented perception experiment supports the phonological point of view, since it shows that the dip/hat contrast can disambiguate German oder-constructions, which are interpretable as ‘alternative’ or ‘yes/no-questions’. This specific function may be derived from a more general substance–function relation: While a hat pattern has a ‘bracketing function’, a dip signals detachment

Segmental intonation information in French fricatives

International audienceWe examined the "segmental intonation" hypothesis (Niebuhr, 2012), according to which voiceless consonants contain spectral information that may contribute to the percept of high or low pitch in the absence of fundamental frequency (F0). French speakers read target words embedded in a carrier phrase and containing fricatives in accentual phrase-initial,-medial or-final position (e.g. sidéré 'stunned', nécessite 'require', ressaisisse 'seize again'), expected to correspond to regions of low, intermediate or high F0, respectively, as well as control words containing only sonorants (e.g. laminé 'rolled'). Analyses show lower center of gravity (CoG) for word-initial (low F0 region) than for word-final (high F0 region) fricatives. For word-final fricatives, CoG is higher at the end than in the beginning of the fricative, which may contribute to the percept of the continuation of the F0 rise across the preceding vowel.ReferenceNiebuhr, Oliver. 2012. At the edge of intonation – The interplay of utterance-final F0 movements and voiceless fricative sounds. Phonetica 69, 7–27

On the role of articulatory prosodies in German message decoding

A theoretical framework for speech reduction is outlined in which 'coarticulation' and 'articulatory control' operate on sequences of 'opening-closing gestures' in linguistic and communicative settings, leading to suprasegmental properties - 'articulatory prosodies' - in the acoustic output. In linking this gestalt perspective in speech production to the role of phonetic detail in speech understanding, this paper reports on perception experiments that test listeners' reactions to varying extension of an 'articulatory prosody of palatality' in message identification. The point of departure for the experimental design was the German utterance ich kann Ihnen das ja mal sagen 'I can mention this to you' from the Kiel Corpus of Spontaneous Speech, which contains the palatalized stretch [k̟(h)ε̈n(j)n(j)əs] for the sequence of function words /kan i.n(kə)n das/ kann Ihnen das. The utterance also makes sense without the personal pronoun Ihnen. Systematic experimental variation has shown that the extent of palatality has a highly significant influence on the decoding of Ihnen and that the effect of nasal consonant duration depends on the extension of palatality. These results are discussed in a plea to base future speech perception research on a paradigm that makes the traditional segment-prosody divide more permeable, and moves away from the generally practised phoneme orientation

On place assimilation in French sibilant sequences

International audienceA corpus of systematically constructed sentences read by 4 female speakers revealed the existence of place assimilation in sequences of French alveolar and postalveolar sibilants. The assimilation manifests itself gradually in time and frequency measurements and is directed towards 'postalveolar'. Thus, it can be regressive and progressive, depending on the order of the place features in the sibilant sequences

Alignment perception of high intonational plateaux in Italian and German

International audienceThis paper addresses the issue of tonal perception as it relates to special configurations, i.e. fundamental frequency (F0) plateaux. We here review a series of perceptual experiments in two different languages, Italian (Naples and Pisa variety) and German. A subset of the auditory stimuli employed in these studies contained a high F0 plateau, which had to be either identified for a specific tonal category or matched to a previous context. The results show a tendency, for all languages, to match a pitch accent category having a late H peak target to plateau stimuli, which might be due to a universal auditory integration mechanism. This has consequences for intonation models, since the relationship between dynamic characteristics of accentual contours and tonal target location is complex and not always immediately identifiable with turning points