Prosody and valence in the newscasting

Prosody plays a central role in communication, contributing to the expression of attitudes and emotions. In professional contexts, such as newscasting, prosody is influenced by the subject characteristics and the audience design, resulting in a particular speaking style. Few studies have investigated the relationship between emotions and newscasting speech. So, this study investigates how emotional valence (negative, neutral, positive) relates to prosodic features in newscasting speech, while also considering the effects of gender and professional function (anchor vs. field reporter). The corpus contains 112 audio recordings produced by 28 Brazilian newscasters, 14 men and 14 women. Valence classification was validated through perception tests based on both transcriptions and audio recordings, ensuring robustness to the classification. Acoustic analysis was conducted using Praat and segmenting the audio recordings into vowel-to-vowel units. Measures of intonation (median, standard deviation, maximum and minimum F0) and rhythm (speech rate, articulation rate, duration of silence) were extracted and statistically analyzed using the Aligned Rank Transform. Results indicate that prosody in newscasting is influenced by valence, gender, and function, though their effects vary across parameters. Valence showed effects on intonational measures, particularly F0 variability, maximum and minimum, with stronger effects observed in female anchors. Male speakers, in contrast, tended to differentiate professional function more clearly through intonation patterns. Rhythm-related parameters revealed that female anchors generally spoke faster than reporters, while male anchors produced longer silences. These findings suggest that valence is influenced by the interaction between factors rather than a single factor in isolation.