Presentation

Towards a Deeper, Uh, Understanding of, Um, L2 Fluency and Its [750 Ms Silence] Correlates

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Abstract

Previous research indicates that filled pauses (Fox Tree, 2001) and pauses that occur at clause boundaries (Brennan & Schober, 2001) tend to be less deleterious to listener judgments of intelligibility and comprehensibility than pauses produced clause-internally (Kang, 2010). Beyond their impact on ease of processing for listeners, hesitation phenomena may also lead to negative social evaluations of the speakers, particularly if pausing patterns are outside of listeners’ linguistic- or culturally bound expectations. The current study aimed to confirm and extend these previous findings through a careful manipulation of natural L2 English speech stimuli, which were then presented to native speakers of English for evaluation. The L2 speech samples used were originally produced by 10 L1 Mandarin and 10 L1 Slavic talkers in the context of an extemporaneous picture description task. Each sample was then carefully manipulated to arrive at five matched versions that were either free of hesitation markers, included hesitation markers at clause boundaries (e.g., um, uh, or silence), or included hesitation markers placed within clauses. Using 9-point Likert-type scales, twenty listeners rated the speech samples for the speakers’ fluency, comprehensibility, intelligence (IQ) and socio-economic status (SES). Findings suggest that unfilled pauses located at clause boundaries have a more positive impact on listeners’ judgements of fluency, comprehensibility, intelligence, and SES.

How to Cite:

Comeaux, K. C. & Thomson, R. I., (2018) “Towards a Deeper, Uh, Understanding of, Um, L2 Fluency and Its [750 Ms Silence] Correlates”, Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Proceedings 10(1).