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.

In a number of languages, intonational patterns at prosodic boundaries are considered to be relevant for turn transition or turn hold. A perception experiment tested the influence of fundamental fr ...

Glottalization is often associated with low pitch in intonation languages, but evidence from many languages indicates that this is not an obligatory association. We asked speakers of German, English and Swedish to compare glottalized stimuli with several pitch contour alternatives in an AXB listening test. Although the low F0 in the glottalized stimuli tended to be perceived as most similar to falling pitch contours, this was not always the case, indicating that pitch perception in glottalization cannot be predicted by F0 alone. We also found evidence for cross-linguistic differences in the degree of flexibility of pitch judgments in glottalized stretches of speech. Index Terms: prosody, voice quality, perception, glottalization

In many cases of turn transition in conversation, a new speaker may respond to phonetic cues from the end of the prior turn, including variation in prosodic features such as pitch and final lengthening. Although consistent pitch and lengthening features are well-established for some languages at potential points of turn transition, this is not necessarily the case for Swedish. The current study uses a two-alternative forced choice task to investigate how variation in pitch contour and lengthening at the ends of syntactically complete turns can influence listeners ’ expectations of turn hold or turn transition. Both lengthening and pitch contour features were found to influence listeners ’ judgments about whether turn transition would occur, with shorter length and higher final pitch peaks associated with turn hold. Furthermore, listeners were more certain about their judgments when asked about turn-hold rather than turn-change, suggesting an imbalance in the strength of turn-hold versus turn-transition cues. Index Terms: prosody, perception, turn-taking 1.

Intonational research is often dependent upon hand-labeling by trained listeners, which can be prone to bias or error. We apply tools from Functional Data Analysis (FDA) to a set of fundamental frequency (F0) data to demonstrate how these tools can provide a less theory-dependent way of investigating F0 contours by allowing statistical analyses of whole contours rather than depending on theoretically-determined “important” parts of the signal. The results of this analysis support the predictions of current intonational phonology while also providing additional information about phonetic variability in the F0 contours that these theories do not currently model.

Intonational variation is widely regarded as a source of information about the topic structure of spoken discourse. However, many factors other than topic can influence this variation. We compared two models of intonation in terms of their ability to account for these other sources of variation. In dealing with this variation, the models paint different pictures of the intonational correlates of topic.