Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Hesitation phenomena in the language production of bilingual speakers: The role of working memory

Hesitation phenomena in the language production of bilingual speakers: The role of working memory This paper is an empirical investigation of the use of hesitation phenomena, specifically filled pauses ( ums and ers ), automatisms ( sort of, at the end of the day ), repetitions and reformulations, in both the mother tongue (L1) and second language (L2) of highly proficient adult bilingual speakers (English and German). Its purpose is to ascertain: i) whether speakers who are highly proficient in L2 produce an approximately similar amount of hesitation phenomena in both languages; and ii) whether the production of such elements (in both languages) is linked to working memory capacity. Results show that: i) despite high proficiency, speakers produced a higher overall rate of hesitation phenomena in their L2, indicating that there was an additional cognitive load imposed by working in L2; and ii) in each language there was an underlying negative relationship between memory capacity and the production of hesitation phenomena, implying that speakers with lower memory ability rely more heavily on such time-buying devices. Furthermore, it was shown that the individual types of hesitation phenomena produced by speakers in their L1 were carried over into their L2, which suggests that a speaker's planning behaviour is mirrored in both languages. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Folia Linguistica de Gruyter

Hesitation phenomena in the language production of bilingual speakers: The role of working memory

Folia Linguistica , Volume 41 (1-2) – Jun 19, 2007

Loading next page...
 
/lp/de-gruyter/hesitation-phenomena-in-the-language-production-of-bilingual-speakers-1GCcNqDqgA

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
©© Mouton de Gruyter –– Societas Linguistica Europaea
Subject
Articles
ISSN
0165-4004
eISSN
1614-7308
DOI
10.1515/flin.41.1-2.37
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This paper is an empirical investigation of the use of hesitation phenomena, specifically filled pauses ( ums and ers ), automatisms ( sort of, at the end of the day ), repetitions and reformulations, in both the mother tongue (L1) and second language (L2) of highly proficient adult bilingual speakers (English and German). Its purpose is to ascertain: i) whether speakers who are highly proficient in L2 produce an approximately similar amount of hesitation phenomena in both languages; and ii) whether the production of such elements (in both languages) is linked to working memory capacity. Results show that: i) despite high proficiency, speakers produced a higher overall rate of hesitation phenomena in their L2, indicating that there was an additional cognitive load imposed by working in L2; and ii) in each language there was an underlying negative relationship between memory capacity and the production of hesitation phenomena, implying that speakers with lower memory ability rely more heavily on such time-buying devices. Furthermore, it was shown that the individual types of hesitation phenomena produced by speakers in their L1 were carried over into their L2, which suggests that a speaker's planning behaviour is mirrored in both languages.

Journal

Folia Linguisticade Gruyter

Published: Jun 19, 2007

Keywords: bilingual; hesitation; prefabricated utterance; speech production; working; memory; L2

There are no references for this article.