Opinionated, Hesitant and Stressed: Three Studies of How Politicians Speak in Four Slavic Parliaments

2026-08-31

AI Summary

研究通过分析四个斯拉夫语议会的6000多小时语音，探讨了情感表达、犹豫停顿和重音变化的问题，使用了声学特征分析、负二项式GEE模型等方法。

Abstract

We present three large-scale studies of spoken parliamentary speech across four Slavic languages (Croatian, Czech, Polish, Serbian), drawing on over 6,000 hours from the ParlaSpeech 3.0 corpus. The first study examines how utterance-level sentiment shapes acoustic realisation: negative speech is consistently produced with higher pitch, greater intensity, and faster rate across all four parliaments, with a secondary arousal-driven upturn at the most positive extreme. The second study models filled pause frequency using negative binomial GEE, finding that speech rate, age, and sentiment are robust cross-lingual predictors, while gender effects reverse between South Slavic (men produce fewer filled pauses) and West Slavic parliaments (no gender difference) - a pattern invisible to single-language designs. The third study investigates primary stress variation in Croatian, showing that speaker-level preferences for early versus late stress cohere across verbs, adjectives, and nouns but decouple for adverbs and proper nouns. We conclude with a research agenda spanning corpus phonetics, disfluency modelling, and political rhetoric.

Problem

• parliamentary speech
• Slavic languages
• sentiment
• filled pauses
• stress variation

Innovation

• sentiment
• acoustic realisation
• filled pause frequency
• negative binomial GEE
• primary stress variation