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Literature review on prosody reveals the lack of corpora for prosodic studies in Catalan and Spanish. In this paper, we present a corpus intended to fill this gap. The corpus comprises two distinct data-sets, a news subcorpus and a dialogue subcorpus, the latter containing either conversational or task-oriented speech. More than 25 h were recorded by twenty eight speakers per language. Among these speakers, eight were professional (four radio news broadcasters and four advertising actors). The entire material presented here has been transcribed, aligned with the acoustic signal and prosodically annotated. Two major objectives have guided the design of this project: (i) to offer a wide coverage of representative real-life communicative situations which allow for the characterization of prosody in these two languages; and (ii) to conduct research studies which enable us to contrast the speakers different speaking styles and discursive practices. All material contained in the corpus is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

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The ability to deliver a speech effectively and persuade the audience is fundamental in the professional landscape. Nonverbal features, such as voice and gestures, are crucial to improving listeners’ perception and information processing in a public presentation. In nonverbal communication research, most studies have mainly examined the individual effects of these features and not their combined influence. Therefore, this study analyzes the direct and interaction effects of intonation, speech rate, and hand gestures on the speakers’ credibility and effectiveness and the participants’ psychophysiological response (attention and arousal). Results showed that the best combination was a moderate intonation at a medium speech rate with a moderate number of hand gestures. These results supported the so-called Expressive Balance Effect. Speakers must maintain the expressive load of the different nonverbal cues in balance to be more effective and credible and enhance the listeners’ cognitive processing. These findings are helpful recommendations for public speakers.

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