Visual prosody of newsreaders: Effects of information structure, emotional content and intended audience on facial expressions

This article investigates whether newsreaders exploit their expressive style for signalling different types of communicatively relevant information. The study reported upon here investigates whether these speakers use their facial expressions to “package” the content of their messages so that they reflect the relative importance, the emotional connotation and the intended audience of the news items. To this end, Dutch newsreaders (addressing audiences consisting of either adults or children) were analysed in terms of their facial expressions. The first study explores whether eyebrow movements and head nods of newsreaders (only adult news) are correlated with the relative prominence of words in their messages. Consistent with findings in the literature for other styles of speech, it was found that pitch-accented words in the newsreader data tended to be marked by variations in eyebrow movements and head nods. The second study aimed to find out whether newsreaders adapt their facial expressions to the seriousness of the topic they are talking about, and, if so, whether this adaptation differs for newsreaders addressing adults or children. Analyses reveal that both the topic and the intended audience had an effect of the newsreaders' expressions, especially as the positive topics and the child-directed news items tended to be more expressive. The relevance of the findings of studies 1 and 2 for speech production and recognition is discussed.