A Cross-Cultural Comparison of American, Palestinian, and Swedish

• Perception of charisma, the ability to influence others by virtueof one’s personal qualities, appears to be influenced to someextent by cultural factors. We compare results of five studies of charisma speech in which American, Palestinian, andSwedish subjects rated Standard American English politicalspeech and Americans and Palestinians rated Palestinian Arabic speech. We identify acoustic-prosodic and lexical featurescorrelated with charisma ratings of both languages for nativeand non-native speakers and find that 1) some acoustic-prosodicfeatures correlated with charisma ratings appear similar acrossall five experiments; 2) other acoustic-prosodic and lexical features correlated with charisma appear specific to the languagerated, whatever the native language of the rater; and 3) stillother acoustic-prosodic cues appear specific to both rater nativelanguage and to language rated. We also find that, while theabsolute ratings non-native raters assign tend to be lower thanthose of native speakers, the ratings themselves are strongly correlated.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Datavetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Computer Sciences (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Språkteknologi (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Language Technology (hsv//eng)

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)