INTERSPEECH 2013 14thAnnual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Lyon, France August 25-29, 2013

Linguistic Disfluency in Narrative Speech: Evidence from Story-Telling in 6-Year Olds

Ingrida Balčiūnienė

Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania

The paper deals with the production of mazes in narrative speech. The analysis is based on experimental data of 24 typically developing monolingual Lithuanian children from middle-class families, attending a state kindergarten. During the experiment, the children were asked to tell a story according to the picture sequence. After transcription of audio-recorded stories, production of mazes was measured automatically by using CHILDES tools; the obtained data was compared to the main microstructural indications such as story productivity and syntactic complexity using SPSS tools. During the investigation, statistically significant positive correlation (p < 0.05) between hesitations and revisions was found. However, production of mazes cannot be related to either story productivity (namely, story length in CU) or to syntactic complexity (namely, CL/CU ratio).

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Balčiūnienė, Ingrida (2013): "Linguistic disfluency in narrative speech: evidence from story-telling in 6-year olds", In INTERSPEECH-2013, 2143-2146.