Abstract:

This talk focuses on the investigation of filler particles like “uh” or “uhm’”  in the speech of bilingual heritage speakers as part of these speakers‘ linguistic repertoire. Filler particles (FPs, Belz 2023) show universal as well as language and speaker specific tendencies in their phonetic form (e.g., Clark & Fox Tree 2002, Candea 2005) while the use of FPs has also been in interpreted as hesitations in speech planning (e.g., Betz et al. 2023) or as linguistic items with discourse organisation function (e.g., Staley & Jucker 2021). Research on heritage speakers (HSs) has reported an influence from the majority to the L1, the heritage language in different linguistic domains while bidirectional influence is less often reported (Polinsky 2018, Van Rijswijk et al. 2017). The analyses are based on data from the RUEG corpus (Wiese et al. 2021) and include semi-spontaneous narrations of both heritage and majority language use of bilingual HSs as well as monolingual data from the German, Russian and English subcorpora (364 speakers). For acoustic analyses, FPs were analysed in a smaller sample of these data (60 speakers) which was then auditorily analysed for segmental structure and acoustically analysed for their prosodic form and their vowel quality by measuring the fundamental frequency, and the first and second formant of FP vowels using Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2024). The results reveal an influence of the dominant majority language on the segmental form of FPs while the vowel analysis shows a substantial overlap of FP vowels across languages with some phonetic variation. The prosodic form of FPs pattern similarly across languages and speaker groups. The analysis of filler particle frequency revealed higher use of FPs in contexts to which speakers are less used to, including addessing the police and heritage language use. The comparison with discourse pragmatic markers showed similar use in relation to their discourse organisation function for all languages and speaker groups.

Marlene Böttcher ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Institut für Skandinavisitk, Frisistik und Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaften an der Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel. Sie beschäftigt sich mit der Produktion und dem Gebrauch von Füllpartikeln wie „uhm“ durch zweisprachige Muttersprachler*innen mit Schwerpunkt auf Häufigkeit, phonetischer Form und pragmatischem Kontext.