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From: Nohemi
Date: 20 Oct 2008
Time: 13:45:15 -0500
Remote Name: 130.70.14.151
A couple years ago, I participated in a study that monitored the progress of non-native learners of Russian. As a subject in this study, I was asked to read aloud a long list of words and then to give a monologue on any subect, as long as I didn't stop talk talking for 3-5 minutes. The researchers collected data from me over a period of six months, and eventually found that, while my pronunciation of words in isolation was getting a little better, my connected speech was getting worse. That is, I had more false starts, stops, pauses, slurs, etc. than before, when I spoke more slowly and deliberately. The paradox, however, was that exactly because I was becoming more disfluent, in essence it meant I was sounding more like a native speaker. That blew my mind! Your remarks about how fluent speech will always contain elements of disfluency, and how aspects of continuous speech are perceived differently for different cultures, helps to account for the paradox. But I have a question. If a 'fluent' speaker presents with more than 10% common disfluencies, say, 30 to 50%, and is not a non-native speaker and does not have any other known pathologies, what is that considered? Hypothetically speaking, do we have a name for him?