# Speech Characteristics as Indicators of Personality Traits
## 4 Discussion  
The study observed that various speech characteristics are associated with some personality dimensions as delineated in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, thereby generally corroborating the relationship between speech (and, more broadly, language) and personality as noted by existing literature. Specifically, it seems that speech rate, response time, intensity, and discourse markers can be used in conjecturing a speaker's personality as informed by the MBTI categories, with each of these features associated with a more targeted personality dimension in its predictive sense. In this section, we discuss the findings presented in the previous section in more detail. Corroborating many previous studies that observed a faster response time among extroverts [22; 23; 35; 36; 37], our study also found that extroverts responded 0.329 s faster than introverts in conversation (\(p\) = 0.035). Compared to the introverted group, extroverts are oriented more toward the outer world. This tendency arguably seems to manifest in the prompt response during an interaction, which presumably requires less inward reflection on the part of a speaker. Our study also found that loudness is differentiated between the judging types and the perceiving types, in which the former spoke with a higher volume (approximately 4.1 dB louder) than the latter (\(p\) = 0.009). In addition to loudness, speech rate was also differentiated between the judging types and the perceiving types (\(p\) = 0.046), in which the former spoke slower than the latter. It is interesting to find that the judging types, who appear in the outside world as more structured and orderly in carrying out a variety of tasks, spoke with a higher volume and spoke slower than the perceiving types, who prefer a more adaptable and spontaneous lifestyle. As with response time, loudness, and speech rate, discourse markers proved to be useful in reflecting different personality types. It was observed that \"well\", identified as \"a response marker\" to establish discourse coherence [38] was more frequently used by the judging types than the perceiving types (\(p\) = 0.013). It could be argued that the judging types--associated with conscientious types per the Big Five model [39]--are relatively more sensitive to the structure of the ongoing discourse in talk, given their tendency to organize their experiences in an orderly way. If thus posited, the judging types might arguably utilize \"well\" more frequently in order to achieve orderliness, or coherence, than the perceiving types, whatever this orderliness means in their minds. Furthermore, \"uh/um\" and \"just\" are more frequently used among the intuiting types than the sensing types. In general, the personality dimension of sensing/intuiting per the MBTI model seems to be the most responsive dimension in differentiating two opposite types based on the use of discourse markers. As mentioned in the previous section, when considering all the discourse markers together, the intuiting group showed a higher frequency rate than the sensing group (\(p\) = 0.005). This might be attributed to the characteristics of the intuiting types, who mainly are proposed to process the information not just through the sensory vehicle, but more importantly, by layering the initial information obtained via senses with interpretive meanings and patterns. These discourse markers can shape the informational or interactional structure of the discourse (e.g., indicating old information vs. new information, weakening or strengthening the effect of a statement, etc. ), thereby reflecting the speaker interpretation not only on their own utterances but also on the context of the ongoing conversation. For example, we downgrade certain information in speech (e.g., \"it was just a game\") because we feel the need to take the emphasis away from the conveyed information.