Introducing the Volume of Extremity (VoX) method to integrate prosodic data into discourse analysis

Vered Silber-Varod, Anat Lerner

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

This study aims to integrate acoustic analysis into discourse analysis. We developed a method that targets the fifth and the ninety-fifth percentiles of acoustic parameters of the four prosodic dimensions: pitch (F0), power (amplitude), duration, and voice quality per each speaker. We then defined a new measure to express the Volume of Extremity (VoX) of a speaker's voice. To demonstrate the strength of our model, we analyzed two political interviews from the Israeli election campaign in 2019, one with Benjamin Netanyahu and the other with Benny Gantz. Findings suggest that the acoustically targeted utterances are meaningful to the speaker but in a complex manner.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)42-62
Number of pages21
JournalLanguage and Communication
Volume89
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 2023

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We wish to thank the anonymous reviewer for valuable comments and suggestions, which greatly improved the final version of this manuscript. This work was supported by the Open Media and Information Lab at The Open University of Israel [Grant Number 20184] and by the Research Authority of The Open University of Israel grant number 507761. The authors wish to thank Prof. Tamir Tassa for suggesting the acronym VoX for our Volume of Extremity method.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Elsevier Ltd

Keywords

  • Acoustic features
  • Communication behavior
  • Discourse analysis
  • Political interviews
  • Prosodic features

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Introducing the Volume of Extremity (VoX) method to integrate prosodic data into discourse analysis'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this