Speaker
Description
This study examines the relationship between prosodic prominence and perceived charisma in conversational speech. We conducted a perception experiment with 92 speech stimuli drawn from a corpus of spontaneous interactions and obtained ratings of charisma, like-ability, self-confidence, and passion from 30 listeners. First, we analyzed the interrelations among these perceptual dimensions and found that charisma ratings of spontaneous conversation excerpts are most strongly associated with perceived likeability, while also showing high correlations with self-confidence and passion. Second, we compared human ratings with prosodic charisma scores derived from the PICSA model, originally developed for longer segments of public speaking. Despite the substantially shorter duration of our stimuli, PICSA scores showed strong correlations with the listener ratings, demonstrating robust predictive validity under conditions of limited temporal input - and for spontaneous conversation excerpts. Third, we examined the distribution of prosodic prominence within utterances, and found that the ratio of prominent words per utterance significantly shaped both human and PICSA-based charisma ratings. Articulation rate, despite influencing PICSA scores, did not contribute to perceived charisma. These findings open new perspectives on the temporal dynamics of charisma perception and the role of prominence and rhythm within the broader set of acoustic-prosodic cues to charismatic speech.