Examining Oral (Dis)Fluency in—uh– —Spanish as a Heritage Language

Abstract

Silence, self-interruptions, or hesitations in spontaneous speech are often interpreted as markers of oral disfluency as they lead to difficulties in delivering a message and in processing it. The main purpose of this study is to examine how such markers of discourse structure factor into the overall oral fluency of 58 US Spanish heritage language learners enrolled in Spanish classes at the college level. Participants were grouped according to age of onset of bilingualism (i.e., sequential or simultaneous) and the order in which they acquired each language (i.e., English first or Spanish first). After completing a semi-controlled oral production task, in both Spanish and English, breakdown pauses and repair pauses were extracted and then analyzed in terms of quantity, quality, and mean duration. Our findings revealed (i) that all groups produced shorter pauses in English, their dominant language; and (ii) that all experimental groups behaved very similarly in Spanish despite having had different experiences with bilingualism growing up. Albeit tentatively, given the sample size and the nature of the present study, we take these findings to suggest that type of heritage bilingualism and the order in which each language was acquired does not seem to play a significant role in terms of production of breakdown and repair pauses.