@inbook{4ff8f9734c044d8da433d471751be5d3,
title = "Persuasive speech is a matter of acoustics and chest breathing only",
abstract = "An oral presentation was given in L2 English by 18 speakers based on a constant text, a so-called “elevator pitch”. The presentation was performed in four conditions: sitting, standing and, in both posture conditions, once with an emotionally neutral newsreader attitude and once with an emotionally expressive onstage attitude aimed at persuading the audience of the presented content. Respiratory Inductance Plethysmography (RIP) was used to record, time-aligned with the acoustic speech signal, the speakers{\textquoteright} breathing signals in the two key areas of their body, chest and abdomen. Combined analyses of prosody and breathing patterns show, firstly, expectable physiological sex differences for f0 parameters as well as for chest and abdomen inhalation amplitudes. Furthermore, higher chest-breathing amplitudes were found in the persuasive presentation condition, along with increases in prosodic parameters related to perceived speaker persuasiveness. Body posture had significant effects neither on breathing nor on prosodic patterns. These results challenge common claims of rhetoric that a speaker{\textquoteright}s voice-related persuasive power critically depends on abdominal “belly breathing” and a standing posture.",
keywords = "speech, prosody, charisma, breathing, elevator pitch, phonetics",
author = "Plinio Barbosa and Oliver Niebuhr",
year = "2020",
month = oct,
day = "28",
language = "English",
isbn = "978-3-631-82875-5",
series = "Kieler Forschungen zur Sprachwissenschaft",
publisher = "Peter Lang",
pages = "551--578",
editor = "Michael Elmentaler and Oliver Niebuhr",
booktitle = "An den R{\"a}ndern der Sprache",
}