Linguistic disfluency in narrative speech: evidence from story-telling in 6-year olds

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 audiorecorded 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).