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

arXiv cs.CL Papers
bilingual-speech speech-rhythm temporal-organization political-discourse phonetics linguistics

Summary

This study investigates temporal organization in bilingual political speech, revealing that consonant-based timing metrics are speaker-specific while vowel-based metrics are language-dependent, with French exhibiting longer and more variable vowels.

arXiv:2609.16274v1 Announce Type: new 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 t-tests. Results show that consonant-based metrics retain speaker-specific 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.
Original Article
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# Speaker-Specific and Language-Dependent Temporal Organization in Bilingual Political Speech
Source: [https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16274](https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16274)
[View PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.16274)

> 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 t\-tests\. Results show that consonant\-based metrics retain speaker\-specific 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\.

## Submission history

From: Nina Hosseini\-Kivanani \[[view email](https://arxiv.org/show-email/c3104d3e/2609.16274)\] **\[v1\]**Thu, 30 Jul 2026 12:57:40 UTC \(7,849 KB\)

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