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FILLED PAUSES ARE SUSCEPTIBLE TO CROSS-LANGUAGE PHONETIC INFLUENCE

EVIDENCE FROM AFRIKAANS-SPANISH BILINGUALS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2020

Lorenzo García-Amaya Open the ORCID record for Lorenzo García-Amaya [Opens in a new window]  and
Sean Lang
Lorenzo García-Amaya
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
Sean Lang
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Abstract

This article investigates the effects of long-term bilingualism on the production of filled pauses (FPs; e.g., uh, um, eh, em) in the speech of Afrikaans-Spanish bilinguals from Patagonia, Argentina. The instrumental analysis draws from a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews obtained from three speaker groups: L1-Afrikaans/L2-Spanish bilinguals; L1-Spanish-comparison speakers, also from Patagonia; and L1-Afrikaans-comparison speakers from South Africa. In the data analysis, we examined relative FP usage (categorical outcomes), as well as phonetic measures of vowel quality and segmental duration (continuous outcomes). The results allude to multiple patterns of cross-language influence (e.g., L1-to-L2 influence, L2-to-L1 influence, bidirectional influence), which depend on the phonetic measure explored. Overall, the findings suggest that the patterns of cross-language phonetic influence observed in the L2 learning of traditionally understood lexical items likewise hold in the L2 learning of hesitation markers such as FPs.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 42 , Issue 5 , December 2020 , pp. 1077 - 1105
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This research was partially funded through the University of Michigan Humanities Collaboratory grant entitled “From Africa to Patagonia: Voices of Displacement.”

References

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