Abstract
It is very important for lecturers to give their students tuition in an understandable way. To do this, the lecturers should pay attention to how they speak in order to effectively convey the meaning of what we are trying to say to students. The lecturers' manner of speaking affects how well students understand lecturers' speech and influences the listeners' overall impression of speech. This paper examines and reports on how various acoustic features included in a lecture speech influence the understanding, and change the impression, of the speech, which is determined by performing tests involving trial subjects. We use lecture speech recorded at a university. First of all, we have conducted a questionnaire for students who attended to a lecture for each lecture. And, relationships between items of the questionnaire were investigated. The result showed that satisfaction level and intelligibility of a lecture for students depends on the lecturers' manner of speaking. In addition to this, the manner of speaking was highly related to various acoustic features such as rate of utterance. In this paper, we focused on the following acoustic features: rate of utterance, loudness, intonation, vocal clarity, and short pauses, and analyzed these features. This study discusses on correlations between these features included in the lecture speech and the impression of listeners based on results of questionnaires that were answered by students.
