Pauses following fillers in L1 and L2 German map task dialogues

Fillers and pauses in spoken language indicate hesitations. Filler type (uh vs. um) is believed to signal a minor or major following speech delay in L1. We examined whether advanced speakers of L2 German use pauses following filler type (äh vs. ähm) in the same way as native speakers do. Two Map Task corpora of L1 and L2 were contrasted with respect to speaker role, filler type and the exact time interval of fillers and pauses. Speaker role influenced the disfluency patterns in L1 and L2 in the same way. Filler type had no impact on the length of the following pause, but the time interval patterns differed significantly. Longer filler intervals are followed by longer pauses in L2 and by shorter pauses in L1. These results suggest that filler type in German is not used to indicate the length of the following delay. Advanced learners seem to have adopted this pattern of use, but cannot overcome their hesitations as fast as native speakers, probably due to their less automatised speech production.