Self‐Repair in Hearing L2 Learners’ Spontaneous Signing: A Developmental Study

Abstract

This study presents a corpus‐based investigation of self‐repairs in hearing adult L2 (M2L2, second modality and second language) learners of Swedish Sign Language (Svenskt teckenspråk, STS). This study analyses M2L2 learners’ STS conversations with a deaf signer and examines the learners’ self‐repair practices and whether there are differences among learners of different proficiency levels. This provides a description of characteristics of self‐repair made by M2L2 learners as well as the frequency and distribution of self‐repair categories. The results show that the frequency of self‐repair decreases with increased proficiency, at least after the initial stage. Furthermore, the self‐initiated repair categories of the beginners are often phonological repairs, while intermediate learners tend to carry out self‐repairs at the lexical and syntactic level. The results also reveal a specific type of STS repair linked to fingerspelling repairs. We discuss the effects of second modality learning as well as the relationship between monitoring and language proficiency.