Language disfluencies in the interpretation of concepts amongst bilinguals

Abstract

Disfluencies may be perceived not only as flaws in the act of speaking, but also as a result of certain cognitive processing, including priming elements, which arise during the encoding, formulation or "interpretation" of concepts among bilingual speakers. Another behavior which could be argued to result from difficulties in cognitive processing in bilinguals could be the need for code-switching. Bilinguals may serve as the ideal models on whom to test for cross-linguistic differences in speech and predict the conditions under which certain elements might be more likely to occur. This study examines what happens when the intended message is converted from its origin as a concept to its interpretation in the target language, applying this to speakers who normally operate in two languages given the Maltese context. In order to do this, an experimental design focusing on a number of variables was set up. The results provide some preliminary indications on how disfluencies can be interpreted both in the light of bilingualism in Malta and also in terms which could be useful for the purposes of work in computational linguistics. Technology can serve as an important tool for identifying disfluencies and possible locations for their occurrences. This research seeks to inform continuing work on corpora annotation, disfluency-solving techniques, code-switch algorithms and other tools useful to speech analysis, which not only act as building blocks for more elaborate systems such as spoken language understanding (SLU) systems, but also to provide a vehicle for humans to understand better the processes at play in the bilingual brain, whose potential goes further than that of any two monolingual brains fused into one.