Measures and perceptions of liveliness in student oral presentation speech: A proposal for an automatic feedback mechanism

This paper analyzes prosodic variables in a corpus of eighteen oral presentations made by students of Technical English, all of whom were native speakers of Swedish. The focus is on the extent to which speakers were able to use their voices in a lively manner, and the hypothesis tested is that speakers who had high pitch variation as they spoke would be perceived as livelier speakers. A metric (termed PVQ), derived from the standard deviation in fundamental frequency, is proposed as a measure of pitch variation. Composite listener ratings of liveliness for nine 10-s samples of speech per speaker correlate strongly (r = .83, n = 18, p < .01) with the PVQ metric. Liveliness ratings for individual 10-s samples of speech show moderate but significant (n = 81, p < .01) correlations: r = .70 for males and r = .64 for females. The paper also investigates rate of speech and fluency variables in this corpus of L2 English. An application for this research is in presentation skills training, where computer feedback could be provided for speaking rate and the extent to which speakers have been able to use their voices in an engaging manner. 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.