A Crosslinguistic Study on Filled Pauses and Prolongations in Italian and Spanish

Although disfluencies exhibit universal properties, comparative studies have demonstrated cross-linguistic differences as well. This study provides a first comparison between Italian and Spanish, investigating formal and functional features of filled pauses (FPs) and prolongations (PRLs) in dialogical speech. For both phenomena, duration was examined. As regards FPs, we looked at their segmental composition and the surrounding context; for PRLs, we considered the lexical category of the word and the position within the word in which they occur. Beyond individual variability, both Italian and Spanish speakers use more PRLs than FPs, with no interlinguistic duration differences. Furthermore, vocalic finalword PRLs are cross-linguistically preferred. However, Italian speakers present a general higher rate of disfluencies. Finally, FPs show a different segmental composition – related to the language-specific phonetic/phonological inventory –, and seem to be involved in different sub-functions.