What makes a speaker engaging? Both what is said and how it is said matter, but in different, complementary ways, a new study conducted at the McGill School of Communication Sciences and Disorders has found.

When people try to sound “engaging,” they tend to speak more loudly and in a higher pitch, and this can lead listeners to evaluate them more positively, the researchers said. However, the study also reveals that the listener’s desire to extend a conversation depends mainly on interest in what the speaker has to say.

“We were surprised to find a clear split: social impressions of the speaker (friendliness, competence, attractiveness) were driven mainly by how they spoke, whereas willingness to extend the conversation was driven primarily by what the conversation was about,” said Marcos Domínguez-Arriola, PhD student and lead author of the study.

“Speaking about something interesting may help sustain an engaging first conversation, but sounding engaging may be more important for whether someone wants to interact with you again,” he clarified. “This distinction helps explain why some conversations feel immediately rewarding but do not lead to lasting connections, while others may feel less exciting yet still foster meaningful relationships.”

For their first experiment, Domínguez-Arriola and Professor Marc D. Pell recruited 20 participants (10 women, 10 men) to record sets of pre-written anecdotes. The 160 anecdotes all followed a similar, short, conversational format and had been classified by another panel of volunteers as “interesting” or “boring.”

The participants were asked to record their anecdotes twice: in a neutral voice and in an “engaging” voice, as if trying to create a positive connection with the listener. The researchers then used acoustic analysis tools to measure different voice features.

“We found that, across speakers, this 'engaging' vocal styling is marked by higher loudness and pitch, more dynamic variation in loudness, and a 'brighter' vocal quality,” said Domínguez-Arriola.

In a second experiment, the researchers recruited 36 people (18 women, 18 men) to listen to the anecdotes. They were asked to rate the speaker on various social traits and to say how long they would be willing to continue the conversation – a key innovative feature of the study that the researchers called “time bidding.”

That was when the researchers found that it was the listener’s interest in the topic – as opposed to the speaker’s oratorical style – that was the most important factor in determining the length of a conversation.

Given that this current experiment was based on asynchronous listening tasks, the researchers say the next step is to study social interactions in real time, taking a closer look at how conversational partners continuously adapt to each other. They also plan to examine what feeling engaged in conversation entails from a neurological perspective.

“Not Worth My Time! Understanding Factors That Make Speech Socially Engaging,” by Marcos E. Domínguez-Arriola and Marc D. Pell was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.

This research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Secretary of Science, Humanities and Innovation (SECIHTI) of Mexico.