The paper presents a case study of two popular US American CEOs. It compares the acoustic vowel space sizes of the more charismatic speaker Steve Jobs and those of the less charismatic speaker Mark Zuckerberg, as part of an initial acoustic step to examine a traditional claim of rhetoric that clearer speech makes a speaker sound more charismatic. Analysing about 2,000 long and short vowel tokens from representative keynote speech excerpts of the two speakers shows that Jobs’ vowel space is, across various segmental and prosodic context factors, significantly larger than that of Zuckerberg, whose vowel space is strongly reduced particularly when addressing investors. The differences in vowel-space size are consistent with the claim of rhetoric that a clear articulation is a key characteristic of a charismatic speaker. The discussion of the results describes further experimental steps required to back up the link between clear pronunciation and speaker charisma.

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In recent years, significant momentum has built up in efforts to integrate the social with the cognitive in theoretical models of speech production/processing and phonological representation. While acknowledging these advances, we argue that what limits our ability to elaborate models of processing and representation in which social-indexical properties of speech are effectively integrated is that we remain some way from fully understanding how these properties are manifested within spoken interaction in the first place. We explore some of these limitations, drawing on data from a study of sociophonetic variability in a population of speakers of Australian English. We discuss issues relating to methods for capturing variability in the realization of vowels and consonants, and we highlight the pivotal role of speech style and the challenges that this raises for models of production and processing.

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