Disentangling the effects of paralinguistic cues in bolstering listeners' engagement with podcasters

Xiaohui Liu, Fei Liu, Yijing Li, Eric Lim

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

Abstract

Despite fierce competition among podcasters, there is a dearth of research that has sought to elucidate the role of paralinguistic elements in fostering listeners' engagement with podcasters on audio platforms. Building on voice persuasion theory, we not only posit prosodic cues (i.e., speech rate, speech pause, and speech stress) as factors affecting listeners' engagement, but we further postulate pitch, a habitual property of podcasters' voice, as having a moderating influence on the effects of the abovementioned prosodic cues. To empirically validate our hypotheses, we employ deep learning to extract the four paralinguistic cues from 10,000 audio files in 221 educational albums obtained from a leading audio platform in China. While analytical results confirm speech pause and speech stress as antecedents of speech rate and that lower speech rate is effective in bolstering listeners' engagement, pitch is revealed to exert no moderating influence on relationship between speech rate and engagement.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationInternational Conference on Information Systems, ICIS 2020 - Making Digital Inclusive
Subtitle of host publicationBlending the Local and the Global
PublisherAssociation for Information Systems
ISBN (Electronic)9781733632553
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2020
Externally publishedYes
Event2020 International Conference on Information Systems - Making Digital Inclusive: Blending the Local and the Global, ICIS 2020 - Virtual, Online, India
Duration: 13 Dec 202016 Dec 2020

Publication series

NameInternational Conference on Information Systems, ICIS 2020 - Making Digital Inclusive: Blending the Local and the Global

Conference

Conference2020 International Conference on Information Systems - Making Digital Inclusive: Blending the Local and the Global, ICIS 2020
Country/TerritoryIndia
CityVirtual, Online
Period13/12/2016/12/20

Keywords

  • Audio platform
  • Paralinguistic cue
  • Pitch
  • Prosodic feature

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty
  • Library and Information Sciences
  • Applied Mathematics

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