The study examined 400 utterances from 10 politicians speaking in both Luxembourgish and French to determine how much of charismatic prosody is due to speaker identity versus language. Mixed‑effects modeling revealed that speaker identity explained most of the variance, while language contributed less but still produced systematic differences: French speech had higher shimmer and phrase‑final F0, suggesting a polite, respectful tone, whereas Luxembourgish speech showed stronger mid‑frequency spectral energy, indicating a more vocally present profile. These acoustic patterns reflect the sociolinguistic roles of Luxembourgish as an informal identity language and French as a high‑prestige institutional variety.
By Nina Hosseini-Kivanani, Nafiseh Taghva, Peter Gilles, Oliver Niebuhr
arXiv:2608.30828v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We present three large-scale studies of spoken parliamentary speech across four Slavic languages (Croatian, Czech, Polish, Serbian), drawing on over 6,...
By Ivan Porupski, Nikola Ljube\v{s}i\'c
Filled pauses (FPs) are a universal feature of spontaneous speech, yet most studies rely on small, single-language corpora, limiting the generalisability of their findings. We analyse ~4,000 hours of parliamentary speech across four related Slavic languages (Croatian, Czech, Polish, Serbian).
The study analyzes oral political language in U.S. presidential debates from 1960 to 2024, focusing on 19 candidates. It finds a clear trend toward simplification: sentence length and complex terms have decreased, while emotional tone has risen and logical, rational content has diminished. The research also explores whether specific presidents exhibit unique stylistic traits and whether language patterns correlate with electoral success.
By Jacques Savoy
arXiv:2608.30260v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: While it is well-established that prosody carries crucial cues for syntactic structure, the degree and nature of correspondence between these two dom...
By Junghyun Min, Alex Warstadt, Tamar I. Regev, Tiago Pimentel, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
This paper investigates whether prosodic features—pitch, energy, and timing—are preserved when speech is translated between languages. Using multilingual dubbing data for English‑German, English‑Spanish, and English‑French pairs, the authors conduct a fine‑grained cross‑lingual analysis to quantify similarities and differences in prosody. The study identifies inherent cross‑lingual correlations in prosodic structure and explores how linguistic and alignment factors influence these patterns.
By Haopeng Xie, Ismail Rasim Ulgen, Sofia Son, Berrak Sisman, Philipp Koehn