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

RESUMO

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.