Comparison of Fluency Characteristics in News-readers and Controls

Abstract

Presentation expertise is an essential characteristic of a successful news-reader. The study aimed to investigate the fluency characteristics like continuity, rate and speech naturalness in TV newscasters and control speakers. The participants included 10 (8 females and 2 males) news readers within the age-range of 25-35 years and 10 age and gender matched controls. Spontaneous speech and reading samples of the participants were audio recorded and analysed for type and percentage of disfluencies, rate of spontaneous speech and reading and speech natural- ness. Three post-graduate speech language pathologists rated the speech samples for naturalness using Multidimensional Speech Naturalness scale (Kanchan & Savithri, 1997). The percentage of disfluencies was higher in control group as compared to news readers both in reading as well as in spontaneous speech tasks. The news readers exhibited normal disfluencies like interjections, pauses, revisions, word fillers, phrase repetitions and whole word repetitions while the normal group in addition showed revisions and word fillers as well as occasional stuttering like disfluencies (SLDs) like part word repetitions, sound repetitions and prolongations. Significant difference in spontaneous speaking rate was evidenced between the two groups, but no significant difference in reading rate was noticed between news readers and controls. Overall naturalness of the spontaneous speech as well as reading samples was dependent on the groups. Hence, the professional news readers differed from the normals in terms of types and percentage of disfluencies, speaking rate and naturalness characteristics.