Work

Speaker-Specific and Language-Dependent Temporal Organization in Bilingual Political Speech

Year: 2026

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Speech rhythm helps structure persuasive speech, but most empirical work examines monolingual English.This study asks how politicians organize timing when speaking Luxembourgish and French.We analyze 400 sentences from ten politicians, annotated for segments and pauses.We compute rhythm metrics, including means, variability, and pairwise variability indices for consonants and vowels.We quantify speaker and language contributions and test within-speaker language effects with paired ttests.Results show that consonant-based metrics retain speakerspecific signatures, whereas vowel-based metrics are largely driven by language choice.French tokens display longer and more variable vowels and vocalic intervals, while consonant timing differences are smaller.No robust language by gender interactions emerge.These findings show that language choice systematically reorganizes rhythmic timing in bilingual public speech.

Source: Interspeech (USB)

DOI: 10.21437/interspeech.2026-1335

Authors: Nina Hosseini-Kivanani, Nafiseh Taghva, Peter Gilles, Oliver Niebuhr

Institutions: University of Luxembourg, Shiraz University, University of Southern Denmark

Language: English

Topic: Phonetics and Phonology Research

Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: bronze

Funders: Université du Luxembourg, Fonds National de la Recherche Luxembourg

OpenAlex ID: W7213473546