Length, speech style, and acoustic characteristics of speech impact perceptions of personality

Abstract

People naturally make judgments about those around them when they see others or hear them speak. The present work examines the impact of length of speech, speech style (read speech or conversational speech), and acoustic characteristics of that speech upon the Big Five personality traits (agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness) attributed to the speaker by unknown listeners. Personality trait ratings were collected from 222 listeners who heard audio clips from different speakers producing different lengths of speech in two speech styles. Linear mixed effects models examining length and speech style were then calculated, which demonstrate that short segments of roughly four to five seconds are generally judged differently from longer segments of around 15 s, while speech style only makes a difference in judgments of conscientiousness. Pearson's correlation coefficients reveal that listeners make use of intensity information more than other acoustic features, with intensity measures shown to correlate with conscientiousness, extroversion, and neuroticism. Other correlations of acoustic features with personality ratings demonstrate that extroversion is particularly easy to identify acoustically, whereas openness and agreeableness are more challenging to capture.