Abstract

Our continuous speech is not fluent, as it is interrupted by different phenomna like filled and silent pauses, or various types of slips of the tongue. These phenomena can occur in parts of spontaneous speech called planning and articulation processes as well, however in different measure, forms and functions. Among them the most frequent category is a filled pause as the hesitation phenomenon. The filled pause as a non-silent period of the speech is defined as a vocal phenomenon of the different types of vovels, consonants or their connections. It can reflect the cognitive strategy of planning process of a speaker and can occur in different articulated forms which can depend on the given language. As there is no experimentally supported knowledge regarding the frequency, distribution, articulation forms and function of filled pauses occurring in teenagers’ spontaneous speech in mother tongue versus foreign language our present research is focused on the following points. i) to analyse the mentioned categories in Hungarian as in mother tongue and in English as in their acquired first foreign language; ii) to compare the data obtained to each other and to show both the interrelations and differences of examined factors in languages iii) to emphasize the results and consequences both in pedagogical and linguistic aspects The speech of teenagers were recorded in digital forms, for the analysis of hesitation phenomena the Praat system and statistic program (SPSS, 13.00 version) was used.