Prosodic Analysis of Attention-Drawing Speech

The term “attention drawing” refers to the action of sellers who call out to get the attention of people passing by in front of their stores or shops to invite them inside to buy or sample products. Since the speaking styles exhibited in such attentiondrawing speech are clearly different from conversational speech, in this study, we focused on prosodic analyses of attention-drawing speech and collected the speech data of multiple people with previous attention-drawing experience by simulating several situations. We then investigated the effects of several factors, including background noise, interaction phases, and shop categories on the prosodic features of attention-drawing utterances. Analysis results indicate that compared to dialogue interaction utterances, attention-drawing utterances usually have higher power, higher mean F0s, smaller F0 ranges, and do not drop at the end of sentences, regardless of the presence or absence of background noise. Analysis of sentence-final syllable intonation indicates the presence of lengthened flat or rising tones in attention-drawing utterances.