Abstract
Based on an analysis of the speech of long-term émigrés of German and Dutch origin, the present investigation discusses to what extent hesitation patterns in language attrition may be the result of the creation of an interlanguage system, on the one hand, or of language-internal attrition patterns on the other. We compare speech samples elicited by a film retelling task from German émigrés in Canada (n = 52) and the Netherlands (n = 50) and from Dutch émigrés in Canada (n = 45) to retellings produced by predominantly monolingual control groups in Germany (n = 53) and the Netherlands (n = 45). Findings show that the attriting groups overuse empty pauses, repetitions, and retractions, whereas the distribution of filled pauses appears to conform more closely to the second language norm. An investigation of the location at which disfluency markers appear within the sentence suggests that they are indicators of difficulties that the attriters experience largely in the context of lexical retrieval.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 753-791 |
| Number of pages | 39 |
| Journal | Language Learning |
| Volume | 60 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Dec 2010 |
Keywords
- Bilingual development
- Crosslinguistic effects
- Disfluency in bilinguals
- First language attrition
- Hesitation markers/hesitations
- L2 influence on L1