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

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.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2608.30828 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2608.30828v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.30828 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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