‘Disfluencies’, defined as a suspension of speech, are usually more frequent in L2 than in L1, which is said to be related to the learners’ proficiency level. ‘Disfluency’ or ‘fluency’ have thus often been associated with language proficiency and temporal characteristics. Grounded in a functionally ambivalent view of (dis)fluency captured in situated multimodal discourse, our research program aims to measure the degree of (dis)fluency found in tandem interactions by comparing their specificities in L1 and L2 productions of French and American English. In this paper, we stress out the need to regard (dis) fluency as a multimodal and multilevel phenomenon, which takes into account vocal and visual-gestural modalities of discourse. While our quantitative results indicate a higher rate of complex (dis)fluencies in L2 than in L1, which supports previous studies, and a higher gestural activity in L2, the qualitative analyses conducted on the data illustrate their multimodal and interactional dimension. This paper presents new methods to evaluate the degree of (dis)fluency, by combining quantitative and qualitative methods, based on an interactional scale, which takes into account the multimodal communication strategies of L2 speakers. We thus argue that (dis)fluency is not only the result of communication breakdowns as it is highly contextualized. It should thus not only be measured with temporal variables and overall frequency rates, but also with regards to the individual speaker’s use in multimodal interactional and intersubjective contexts.

The present corpus study aims to contribute to the debate regarding the lexical or non-lexical status of filled pauses. Although they are commonly associated with hesitation, disfluency, and production difficulty, it has also been argued that they can serve more fluent communicative functions in discourse (e.g., turn-taking, stance-marking). Our work is grounded in a usage-based and discourse-functional approach to filled pauses, and we address this debate by examining the multiple characteristics of euh and eum in spoken French, as well as their co-occurrence with discourse markers. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses, we analyze their distribution across different communication settings (prepared monologs vs. spontaneous conversations) and levels of language proficiency (native vs. non-native). Quantitative findings indicate differences in frequency, duration, position, and patterns of co-occurrence across corpora, and our qualitative analyses identify fine-grained differences, mainly two distinct patterns of distribution (initial position clustered with a discourse marker vs. medial position clustered with other hesitation markers), reflecting the different “fluent” and “disfluent” uses of filled pauses. We thus argue for a dual status of euh and eum based on formal, functional, and contextual features.

In order to model hesitations for technical applications such as conversational speech synthesis, it is desirable to understand interactions between individual hesitation markers. In this study, we explore two markers that have been subject to many discussions: silences and fillers. While it is generally acknowledged that fillers occur in two distinct forms, um and uh, it is not agreed on whether these forms systematically influence the length of associated silences. This notion will be investigated on a small dataset of English spontaneous speech data, and the measure of distance between filler and silence will be introduced to the analyses. Results suggest that filler type influences associated silence duration systematically and that silences tend to gravitate towards fillers in utterances, exhibiting systematically lower duration when preceding them. These results provide valuable insights for improving existing hesitation models.

"The study of so-called ‘disfluency’ phenomena (uh and um, filled and unfilled pauses, self-repairs and the like) has gained a lot of attention in various fields in linguistics in the past few decades, but a majority of studies tend to be production-oriented and often disregard fundamental aspects of face-to-face communication such as interactional dynamics and gesture. This paper presents a multimodal and multilevel model of “inter-fluency”, considering different levels of analysis, mainly, talk, gesture, and interaction, by combining different theoretical frameworks and methodologies in gesture studies and interactional linguistics in order to bridge this gap and go beyond previous cognitive-oriented models. Keywords: Interaction, fluency, gesture, multimodality, interactive model"

Cette étude exploratoire s’inscrit dans un projet d’analyse des (dis)fluences sur un corpus français oral spontané et préparé qui prend en compte les différentes modalités du discours (linguistique, vocal, visuel, gestuel) et qui s’inscrit dans une perspective de linguistique interactionnelle. Les (dis)fluences, caractérisées par une interruption du flux verbal et vocal, ont souvent été strictement analysées du point de vue de la production, et cette étude a pour objectif de dépasser cette approche formelle et de rendre compte de leur ambivalence fonctionnelle et de leur contribution à l’interaction. L’analyse porte sur une paire de locuteurs du corpus, et les résultats préliminaires indiquent un taux de (dis)fluence plus élevé en contexte de discours préparé en classe qu’en conversation semi-spontanée, ce qui servira de point de départ pour de futures analyses quantitatives plus détaillées sur l’ensemble des données. Cet article repose sur des analyses qualitatives fines d’un extrait de séquence narrative humoristique qui soulignent la dimension interactionnelle des (dis)fluences et la manière dont elles peuvent être employées par les locuteurs à des fins discursives et rhétoriques dans le cadre de tâche narrative.