Hege Larsson Aas

• Aas, Hege Larsson & Rørvik, Sylvi (2022). Exploring the use of repeats in learners’ native and interlanguage production. In Leńko-Szymańska, Agnieszka & Götz, Sandra (Ed.), Complexity, Accuracy and Fluency in Learner Corpus Research. John Benjamins Publishing Company. ISSN 9789027212580 . p. 299–324. doi: https:/doi.org/10.1075/scl.104.12aas. Show summary

  This chapter investigates repeats in native language (L1) Norwegian and interlanguage (IL) English, with the aim of exploring interlanguage fluency variations and the potential existence of individual speaking styles across both L1 and IL production. We manually identified and categorized repeats in six interviews from the (forthcoming) Norwegian component of the LINDSEI corpus (Gilquin et al. 2010) and interviews with the same speakers in their L1. Our results show that repeats occur more frequently in the IL, but there is also evidence of individual variation in speaking styles. We conclude by suggesting some pedagogical implications of our results as related to the teaching and assessment of fluency behavior, emphasizing individual cross-linguistic behavior in the face of processing difficulties.

• Aas, Hege Larsson & Nacey, Susan Lee (2019). Methodological concerns for investigating pause behavior in spoken corpora. In Degand, Liesbeth; Gilquin, Gaëtanelle; Meurant, Laurence & Simon, Anne Catherine (Ed.), Fluency and Disfluency across Languages and Language Varieties. Presses universitaires de Louvain. ISSN 978-2-87558-769-5. p. 41–64.
• Aas, Hege Larsson & Rørvik, Sylvi (2017). Investigating individual pause profiles through the use of a comparable NL1/IL corpus. In de Haan, Pieter; De Vries, Rina & Van Vuuren, Sanne (Ed.), Language, Learners and Levels: Progression and Variation.. Presses universitaires de Louvain. ISSN 978-2-87558-595-0. p. 309–332.

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• Aas, Hege Larsson (2023). Aspects of (dis)fluency.
• Aas, Hege Larsson (2022). Aspects of (dis)fluency.
• Aas, Hege Larsson (2019). Repeats in native and interlanguage speech: Exploring traces of cross-linguistic influence and individual variation .
• Aas, Hege Larsson & Rørvik, Sylvi (2019). Repeats in native and interlanguage speech: Exploring traces of cross-linguistic influence and individual variation in fluency behavior.
• Aas, Hege Larsson & Rørvik, Sylvi (2018). Fillers in Native and Interlanguage Speech.
• Aas, Hege Larsson & Nacey, Susan Lee (2017). Investigating fluency variables in learner language: Methodological concerns. Show summary

  This paper discusses methodological concerns related to the identification and analysis of fluency variables in studies of spoken native and interlanguage corpora. The specific focus here is pause behaviour observed in relation to interlanguage fluency, an area that has received growing attention in recent years. The paper addresses the following research question: How can a spoken learner corpus be compiled to make valid claims about utterance fluency variations? Pauses, like other phenomena associated with hesitation, can be “welcome as overt, measurable indications of processing activity which requires a certain amount of time” (Chafe 1980, p. 170). The frequency and duration of pauses can be studied independently as potential hesitation phenomena, but pauses are also an important component of other variables often measured in fluency research, such as mean length of run (MLR) and phonation-time ratio. These measures are viewed as utterance fluency variables in Segalowitz’ (2010) trifold definition of second language fluency, described as any observable feature of the utterance that can potentially indicate a speaker’s ability to process language (cognitive fluency), and/or affect listeners’ perceptions of the same speaker’s fluency level (perceived fluency): “it is not possible to globally characterize a person’s L2 speech as “fluent” in some unidimensional, absolute fashion. All that one can say at this point is that under such and such circumstances a person’s L2 speech has certain objectively measurable characteristics and that these can be interpreted by listeners to be fluent or dysfluent in particular ways” (Segalowitz, 2010, p. 39). Contrastive studies of native and interlanguage speech production (e.g. Ginther et al., 2010;Götz, 2013) typically reveal between-group differences in measurements based on pause identification, and these differences are often seen as “fluency gaps” (Segalowitz, 2010), reflecting differences in the cognitive fluency levels of the speakers when processing the language. Conclusions about interlanguage fluency from such studies necessarily rest upon the transcriptions and annotations of the spoken language under study, e.g. that the pauses analysed reflect what was actually said (or not said, in the case of unfilled pauses). Consequently, in studies based on transcription data, views of pause behaviour across languages may easily be constrained by the choices made at the transcription stage of spoken corpus compilation. A valid and reliable transcription of pauses in spoken language – in particular conversational data – requires overt consideration of a number of issues that may not be immediately obvious. These include (a) the presence of initial silences, (b) pauses that occur in conjunction with overlapping speech and backchanneling, and (c) end-of turn pauses (when does a turn end?). As observed by Du Bois et al. (1992), “in some cases, the question of who a pause belongs to, how long it lasts, and even whether it has occurred in a specific place, become subtly and inextricably linked to the interpretation of turn-taking and overlapping between speakers” (p. 42). In an attempt to bring this perspective to the forefront, we present examples from our data to illustrate the various challenges involved. Our point of departure is the compilation of two related spoken corpora: The unpublished Norwegian version of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) (Gilquin, De Cock, & Granger, 2010), and its smaller counterpart (NorwC) consisting of interviews with some of the same speakers speaking in their L1 Norwegian (NL1, cf. Gilquin (2008)). Based on a close analysis of the transcription of pause behaviour in six interviews, the paper argues that speech production as a whole should not be considered in isolation, and that utterances should not be viewed as independent from their immediate co-text.

• Aas, Hege Larsson & Rørvik, Sylvi (2015). Investigating individual pause profiles through the use of a comparable NL1/IL corpus. Show summary

  This paper presents the results of a study exploring the use of unfilled pauses in spoken texts by Norwegian non-native speakers of English. It also presents a small corpus currently under compilation that will allow for contrastive analyses of data from speakers’ native (NL1) and interlanguage (IL) production.

• Aas, Hege Larsson (2014). Fluency and the Use of Frequent Lexical Bundles in Spoken Texts by Norwegian Non-Native Speakers of English. Show summary

  This poster presents the results from a study investigating the relation between fluency levels and the use of highly frequent lexical bundles in a corpus of advanced non-native English speech. The material used consists of audio recordings and transcriptions of fifty interviews from the forthcoming Norwegian component of the LINDSEI corpus of spoken English interlanguage (Gilquin, De Cock, & Granger, 2010). Samples from the native speaker (BrE) corpus LOCNEC (ibid.) were used as reference.

• Aas, Hege Larsson (2013). Fluency in Spoken English.
• Aas, Hege Larsson (2013). “eh oh I think that is eh...”: I think functioning as an utterance launcher in spoken learner English. Show summary

  The study investigates the extent to which frequent recurrent word-combinations function as utterance launchers, "expressions which have a special function of beginning a turn or an utterance" (Biber et al. 1999: 1073), in spoken learner language. The word-combinations and their frequencies are extracted from the unpublished Norwegian component of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) (Gilquin et al. 2010), which contains spoken interviews of advanced learners of English with a Norwegian native language background.

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