What’s pitch got to do with it? – The connection between speech prosody and investor-pitch success

Abstract

German investor-pitch presentations were acoustically analyzed based on five tonal and five non-tonal prosodic features. Results show that both feature sets significantly predicted the placements of these presentations in the ‘Rheinland Pitch’ competition series. We conclude in line with previous studies on speaker charisma that prosody plays a considerable role for the success of presentations and their speakers.