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Article published In:
Segmental, prosodic and fluency features in phonetic learner corpora
Edited by Jürgen Trouvain, Frank Zimmerer, Bernd Möbius, Mária Gósy and Anne Bonneau
[International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 3:2] 2017
► pp. 118–148

Fluently disfluent?

Pauses and repairs of advanced learners and native speakers of German

| Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
| Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
| Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
| Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

In this article, we explore the disfluencies of advanced learners and native speakers of German in spontaneous speech. We focus on the frequency, form, and place of silent and filled pauses as well as self-repairs. Frequency significantly differs for silent pauses only. As to form, the distribution for both filled pauses and repair types significantly differs between the groups, while the proportion of within-repair hesitations (‘interregna’) is similar. For the neighbouring tokens of filled pauses, learners adhere to the pattern of their native language English, which is significantly different from the pattern we find for native German. Our results indicate that for some aspects of disfluencies, it seems that learners can adapt to a native-like pattern, while others are imported from the L1. Still others are significantly different from both the target and the native pattern. We present different possible explanations for all these cases.

Keywords: disfluencies, repairs, spontaneous speech, fluency, filled pauses
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Disfluencies
    • 2.1Disfluencies in general
    • 2.2Silent and filled pauses
    • 2.3Repairs
  • 3.Differences between learners and native speakers
    • 3.1Frequency
    • 3.2Form
    • 3.3Place
  • 4.Method and data
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1Frequency
      • 5.1.1Silent and filled pauses
      • 5.1.2Repairs
    • 5.2Form
      • 5.2.1Filled pauses
      • 5.2.2Repairs
    • 5.3Place
      • 5.3.1Filled pauses
      • 5.3.2Repairs
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.3.2.02bel
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