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
Subjects
Americans
Palestinians
Swedish
Americans
Palestinians
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?
What is Charismatic Speech?
• 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?
Number and
Gender
Study
12 (6 F, 6 M)
12 (6 F, 6 M)
9 (6 F, 3 M)
12 (3 F, 9, M)
12 (3 F, 9, M)
English
English
English
Arabic
Arabic
kappa
charisma
agreement
0.232
0.185
0.226
0.383
0.348
• 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.
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-toSpeech system, when compelling
speech is needed (e.g., Intelligent
tutoring system)
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 lexicosyntactic and acoustic-prosodic
features of the tokens to identify
potential cues to perception of
charisma
AmeEng PalEng SweEng AmeArb PalArb
Feature
•
•
•
•
•
•
Mean pitch
Mean and sdv of rms intensity over IPs
Pitch Range
Proportion of words with !H* accent
Token Duration
Proportion of words with H* pitch accents
•
•
•
•
Proportion of L*
Disfluency (filled pause and self-repairs)
Min f0
Sdv f0
• Max intensity
• Sdv intensity
• Speaking rate
Lexical Features
AmeEng PalEng SweEng AmeArb PalArb
Feature
• 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
American, Palestinian, and Swedish
Subjects Judging English Tokens
• Repeated words
• Third person plural pronoun
•
•
•
•
•
First person plural pronouns
Third person singular pronouns
Ration of adjectives
Ratio of nouns
Dialect
Significant positive correlation with charisma
Significant negative correlation with charisma
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 rated 6/45 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.
__________________________________________________________
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?
Acoustic/Prosodic Featurs
• 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
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.
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
Study
Study
Difference
Ame->Eng
PalEng
Not significant
Ame->Eng
SweEng
Significant
SweEng
PalEng
AmeArb
PalArb
Not significant
Significant
• 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 Palestinians contain speech produced in a
more compressed pitch rangebut with a greater mean HiF0 value.
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.