Umm... With Transformers? Insights from Filled Pause Use across Four Slavic Parliaments
Provides large-scale cross-linguistic evidence on filled pauses, challenging prior findings on gender effects and revealing new associations with sentiment and political factors.
Analyzed ~4,000 hours of parliamentary speech across four Slavic languages using transformer-based detection to study filled pauses, finding that age and speech rate negatively correlate with FP rate, while gender effects are language-specific and sentiment positively correlates with FP rate.
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). FP occurrence is obtained via transformer-based automatic detection, while FP rate is modelled using Generalised Estimating Equations (GEE) with Mundlak correction to distinguish within- from between- speaker effects. We replicate a negative association of age and speech rate with FP rate, but find that gender effects are language-specific and directionally opposite to most prior literature. Novel analyses of sentiment, political orientation, and power status reveal a consistent positive association between sentiment and FP rate, alongside parliament-specific modulation by orientation and power status, with opposition speakers tending toward lower FP rates than governing coalition speakers.