Speech as a Personality Trait

Abstract

Speech in intuitively interpreted by normal human beings as an index of personal expression. Its actual analysis, however, from this standpoint is difficult. Several distinct strands may be detected in what looks at first sight like an integral phenomenon. The social norm is always to be distinguished from the individual increment of expression, which is never discernible in itself, but only as measured against this norm. Moreover, "speech" consists of at least five levels of behavior, the expressive value of any one of which need not be confirmed by all the others. These levels are the voice as such, speech dynamics, the pronunciation, the vocabulary, and the style of connected utterance. Owing to the possibility of detecting conflict and other symptomatic reactions in speech, language behavior becomes a suggestive field for research in problems of personality.

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