Measuring a speaker's acoustic correlates of pitch - but which? A contrastive analysis for perceived speaker charisma

Intonation is a multitasker. It conveys a plethora of non-lexical meanings and functions, and mirrors a speaker’s personality traits, one of them being charisma. In the age in which leaders communicate globally through digital mass media, speaker charisma has become an important field of research. The number of different f0 level and range measures that are used, not only in phonetics, to determine speaker charisma call for standardization. Which f0 measures correlate most strongly with perceived speaker charisma and should thus be used in future analyses? Our study addresses this question based on 51 speakers whose charisma was rated by 42 listeners. Results show that the f0 mean is the best parameter to measure perceived charisma in terms of pitch level, while the best pitch distribution measures are kurtosis and the 80-percentile f0 range. The results are discussed in terms of gender differences and issues of cross-linguistic generalization.