"Interviewers who spoke moderately fast, at a rate of about 3.5 words per second, were much more successful at getting people to agree than either interviewers who talked very fast or very slowly," said Jose Benki, investigator at the Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR).

Using recordings of 1,380 introductory calls made by 100 male and female phone interviewers at the ISR, Benki and colleagues analysed the interviewers' speech rates, fluency, and pitch, and correlated those variables with their success in convincing people to participate in the survey.

Since people who talk too fast are seen as out to pull the wool over listener's eyes, and people who talk slow are seen as not too bright or overly pedantic, the finding about speech rates seems to make sense.

But another finding from the study, funded by the National Science Foundation, suggests otherwise.

"We assumed that interviewers who sounded animated and lively, with a lot of variation in the pitch of their voices, would be more successful," said Benki, a speech scientist with a special interest in psycholinguistics, the psychology of language.

"But in fact we found only a marginal effect of variation in pitch by interviewers on success rates," he said.

Pitch, the highness or lowness of a voice, is influenced largely by body size and corresponding size of the voice box, Benki says. Typically, males have low-pitched voices and females high-pitched voices.

"It could be that variation in pitch could be helpful for some interviewers but for others, too much pitch variation sounds artificial, like people are trying too hard. So it backfires and puts people off," added Benki.

Researchers also found that interviewers who engaged in frequent short pauses were more successful than those who were perfectly fluent.

These findings were presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research Saturday.

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