A Quantitative Comparison of Disfluencies Types between Native and Non-native English Speakers in Spontaneous Speech
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2002
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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Abstract
Disfluencies, parts of conversation which do not seem to add to the main content
of the dialogue, have been studied in vastly different ways in the past few decades. This
thesis investigates the occurrence of disfluencies in natural native and non-native English
speech, and examines the types of disfluencies used among the two groups of speakers
according to 1) the different syntactic positions in which they occur, and 2) the frequency
of occurrence of the different types of disfluencies. Non-native and native speakers of
English produce disfluencies in every day conversation, and this thesis investigates the
hypothesis that it is impossible to distinguish between either group based on numbers and
rates of disfluencies simply because all speakers generate comparable numbers of
disfluencies of the same types.
The basic method used to substantiate this thesis consists of collecting data
through conducting interviews with both non-native and native speakers of English.
They participate in conversations ranging in numerous, arbitrary topics, and the data they
provide are examined. The frequency of disfluencies are observed, and a few types of
disfluency are studied by noting the syntactic properties of these disfluencies that are
common to each of the conversations.