Effect of the content complexity on hesitations in adolescents’ narratives

Abstract The paper presents analysis of the hesitations in adolescents’ narratives. The speech disfluencies in the adolescents differ from those of the adults by frequency of self-corrections and pauses of hesitation. The adolescents rarely turn to repair their narratives but often interrupt the speech flow by pauses while telling a story stimulated by a wordless book. The lack of self-corrections reflects the specific problems with self-control and self-regulation due to immaturity of the executive function. Narrating about a complex multi-propositional event, the adolescents often experienced hesitation that provoked more self-repairs and hesitation pauses compared to the telling the story about a simple event. The description of the relatively simple content was more complicated syntactically than that of the multi-propositional event. Meanwhile, the content complexity significantly influences frequency of the silent hesitation pauses.