Linguistic Disfluencies in Korean-English Bilingual Children in the Narrative Generation and Retell Task

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to examine the frequency and types of linguistic disfluencies that are produced by typically developing bilingual Korean-English (KE) speaking children and to investigate whether their disfluent speech is mediated by language produced and/or language exposure duration. Methods: Nineteen bilingual KE speaking children (12 boys, 7 girls) and twenty-one monolingual Korean speaking children (8 boys, 13 girls) aged 6-9 participated in this study. Narratives were elicited using story generation and retell tasks in each language. The frequency and types of linguistic disfluencies (fillers, repetitions, revisions, and pauses) were analyzed. Results: The bilingual group showed a significantly higher rate of total disfluency, fillers, and repetitions than the monolingual group. There was no significant difference in the rates of disfluency between narrative task types. In terms of the language produced, the bilingual group produced more revisions and more disfluencies in Korean than in English during the story generation task. In the retell task, there was a significant difference in the total disfluency rate, fillers, and revisions depending on the language the child was speaking. A significant negative correlation between English language exposure duration and the total disfluency rate was found. Conclusion: Bilingual KE speaking children showed higher disfluency rates than monolingual peers in story generation and retell tasks. Results showed that the disfluency can be influenced by the grammatical structure of the language being spoken and the levels of language experience. Results suggest the exposure duration to second language, language proficiency, and morphological distinctions between two languages need to be considered for assessment and intervention.