‘Disfluency’ features in bilingual speech: meaning and methodology

Abstract This study provides a concise review of the often under-scrutinized interpretation of ‘disfluency’ features – fillers, pauses, false starts – in the speech of bilingual individuals, here collectively called ‘flags’. It urges that the interpretations attributed to these asemantic and multifunctional speech elements be empirically justified and demonstrates a means by which to justify (or not) meanings commonly attributed to flags. This study is uncommon among those that explore flagging/disfluency behaviors in that the number of individuals whose speech serves as the source of data is large, coming from a corpus of 113 sociolinguistic interviews with Spanish-English bilinguals in New York City. In particular, this study explores one interpretation of these elements: that flags demonstrate a speaker’s awareness of the origin or ‘belongingness’ of a nearby English-origin string (which is here called the ‘language membership’ assumption). It formulates this interpretation as a set of hypotheses and describes the sort of data from the corpus that would support these hypotheses. That is, it explores whether there is evidence to support the idea (a) that speakers use flagging elements to indicate their awareness of and point out the ‘other-language’ elements in their discourse and (b) that what is foreign-origin or ‘other language’ is also perceived as not being integrated into the Spanish lexicon. Results indicate that there is evidence in this corpus and among these bilinguals to support both versions of the hypothesis. Implications and limitations are discussed briefly.