ISCA Archive Interspeech 2025
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2025

Bilingual Speakers Exhibit Cognitive Fatigue: A Speech Disfluencies Case Study on Research Talks

Ashwin Ram, Marisol Muñoz, Zoi Gkalitsiou, Alexandros G. Dimakis

Speech disfluencies are vital for understanding cognitive processes and improving speech recognition systems. We curate a dataset with annotated text and labeled speech disfluencies from more than 20 hours of speech from monolingual and bilingual speakers. Furthermore, we illustrate a large-scale validation of a bilingual cognitive fatigue phenomenon that seems to be independent of the two spoken languages of the speakers. That is, after navigating a lexically complex word, bilingual speakers tend to use a disfluency, such as a filled pause or repair, followed by a phonetically simpler word in order to possibly regain momentum for subsequent utterance segments. We conclude by exploring how our research can help speech pathologists by revealing distinct bilingual cognitive strategies and how they manifest in speaker disfluencies.