Abstract
The article presents a psycholinguistic study of the oral speech of pre-adolescent Russian speakers. The current study compared the quantitative characteristics of speech disfluencies (silent and filled hesitation pauses, false starts, and repetitions among them) on the material of two corpora of oral texts: one of which was an annotated transcript of dialogues of children asged 10-12 solving in pairs a certain problem, and the second corpus consisted of dialogues between adults in the identical situation. Through the comparison of the two corpora, the author aimed at determining differences in speech behavior of two age groups put in the same conditions. The analysis of the collected data showed that there is a statistically significant difference between the two samples in the number of silent pauses and their length between the interlocutors’ utterances, as well as by one of the types of repairs, which may indicate the ongoing development of certain speech skills in children of this age. These results support the theory of late discursive development which indicates the need for further comprehensive research of pre-adolescent children speech, even though this period traditionally is neglected by researchers.
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