Linguistic Disfluency in Story-telling: Evidence from Lithuanianand Russian-speaking Preschoolers

Speech disfluency can be distinguished as being either stuttering or linguistic disfluency; the latter can be divided into categories such as hesitations, fillers, repetitions, revisions, and connectors. Significance of linguistic disfluencies in the flow of conversation has been particularly emphasized at the very beginning of studies in conversational analysis; however, linguistic disfluency in children speech still has not been widely investigated. The paper deals with the production of mazes in story-telling. Our analysis was based on experimental data of two (Lithuanian- and Russian-speaking) groups of typically-developing monolingual children from middle-class families, attending state kindergartens. During the experiment, the children were asked to tell a story according to the picture sequence. After transcription of video-/audio-recorded stories, production of mazes was measured automatically by using CLAN tools. The study highlighted the main tendencies of linguistic disfluency in the narratives of Lithuanian- and Russian-speaking TD preschoolers, such as dominance of hesitations (especially, silent (unfilled) pauses) among all the mazes and prevalence of lexical reformulations among all the revisions. Only a few but significant differences were obtained between the groups: first, only in the Russian-speaking group hesitations correlated with revisions; second, in the Russian-speaking group, repetitions correlated with fillers, while in the Lithuanian-speaking group a correlation between silent (unfilled) pauses and repetitions was identified. The differences observed between the groups might lead to raising a question about cross-linguistic and cross-cultural universalities and differences from the perspective of linguistic disfluency in narrative speech.